Monday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Aug 31, 2015 at 7:10 am

As Lyle Denniston reported for this blog, last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a federal law prohibiting protests and demonstrations on the Supreme Court’s plaza.  Other coverage comes from Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required) and Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal.

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr criticizes last week’s article in The New York Times on recent studies that analyze overlap between the Court’s opinions and briefs submitted to the Court in those cases; the article cited Justice Clarence Thomas as having the highest “overlap” rate among the Justices in the Roberts Court era.  Kerr contends that, if “you look at the data . . . they don’t support the conclusion that Justice Thomas is an outlier.” Similarly, at Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger asserts that “Justice Thomas is barely different at all from Justice Sotomayor and not much different from Justice Ginsburg, a result very different from the initial impression formed by the top of the article.” 

Briefly:

• Elsewhere in The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Coyle reports that, although this Term the Court is expected to “decide whether its 2012 ban on mandatory life without parole sentences for juvenile murderers is retroactive,” “some of those offenders and their lawyers hope for more from the justices.”
• Also at Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger comments on the (uneventful) summer orders list, observing that although he “can’t remember a single case” in which the Court has granted rehearing after full briefing and oral argument on the merits, “lawyers keep filing the petitions.”
• Alison Frankel of Reuters suggests that the “best argument Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson made this week in separate briefs opposing the Justice Department’s petition for U.S. Supreme Court review of a decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned their insider trading convictions is that even if the justices sided with the government, the outcome of the case wouldn’t change.”

If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.