Friday round-up
on Aug 4, 2017 at 7:21 am
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will institute electronic filing beginning on November 13, 2017. Andrew Hamm covers the announcement for this blog. Additional coverage comes from Jessica Gresko at the Associated Press and Brian Fung in The Washington Post, who reports that “[t]he change will allow the public to access legal filings for all future cases — free of charge.” At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger welcomes the prospect of free public access to filings, noting that “[i]n the lower federal courts, public documents are available only by payment of a fee that has little relation to the cost of providing the service.”
At Take Care, Leah Litman argues that the Supreme Court’s scheduling of the oral argument in the entry-ban cases for the second week, rather than the first week, of the October session “might be further evidence of what several commentators identified in the Supreme Court’s June 26 decision and order—an inclination to never decide the case on its merits.” At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that in a filing yesterday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the Hawaii challengers to the entry ban “accused the Administration … of continuing to defy the Supreme Court by insisting on more power to exclude foreign nationals than the Justices have given it” and of “wrongly claiming that the Supreme Court has already upheld the government’s power to exclude even refugees who currently have some formal ties to the United States.”
Briefly:
- At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern remark on the growing influence of Justice Clarence Thomas’ “idiosyncratic” “right-wing worldview,” noting that Thomas’ “once-fringy ideas are suddenly flourishing—not only on the high court, through his alliance with [Justice Neil] Gorsuch, but also in the executive branch.”
- Constitution Daily marks the anniversary of Justice Stephen Breyer’s swearing-in as a Supreme Court justice and traces Breyer’s “path to the nation’s highest court[, which] included stops at Harvard, the federal court system, and a brief stint as a Watergate counsel.”
- In an op-ed for The Hill, Nagesh Rao argues that the Supreme Court should “seize the opportunity to defend higher patent quality” by granting a cert petition filed by Samsung in an ongoing patent dispute with Apple involving smartphone design.
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