Opinion ID: 170720
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Hubbard v. United States, 514 U.S. 695 (1995)

Text: The existence of the judicial function exception remained untested until 1995, when the Supreme Court decided Hubbard v. United States . In Hubbard, the Court held that the judicial branch is not a `department' under § 1001; in so doing, it overruled [ Bramblett, ], where, applying § 1001 to the legislative branch, the Court had broadly interpreted `department' to describe the `executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Government.' United States v. Espy, 145 F.3d 1369, 1373 (D.C.Cir.1998) (internal citations omitted); see also Hubbard, 514 U.S. at 702, 115 S.Ct. 1754 (explaining that Bramblett itself must be acknowledged as a seriously flawed decision). Addressing the majority's holding that § 1001 did not apply to the judicial branch, Justice Scalia's concurrence warned that there remains ... a serious concern that the threat of criminal prosecution under the capacious provisions of § 1001 will deter vigorous representation of opposing interests in adversarial litigation, particularly representation of criminal defendants, whose adversaries control the machinery of § 1001 prosecution. Hubbard, 514 U.S. at 717, 115 S.Ct. 1754 (Scalia, J., concurring) (emphasis in original). It was in the wake of Hubbard that Congress decided to amend § 1001.