Friday round-up

For The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that six Harvard Law School graduates who also happen to be current or retired Supreme Court justices convened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, yesterday to help celebrate the law school’s 200th anniversary. Additional coverage comes from the Associated Press and from Michael Levenson at the Boston Globe, who reports that “[t]he discussion showcased the justices in a less formal and often jovial setting, as they laughed frequently and talked about their favorite professors and the challenges of serving on the nation’s highest court.”

For The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that “U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco will make the government’s arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court in December in support of a Colorado baker who refused on religious grounds to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.” In an op-ed for The Hill, James Gottry weighs in on the case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, arguing that “[t]he issue is not whether you support same-sex marriage or [the baker; t]he issue is whether you support artistic freedom.”

Briefly:

• At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley launches a hard-hitting “investigation in pursuit of [Justice Neil Gorsuch’s] steak rub, after Gorsuch declined to disclose the constituent parts of his secret rub during an oral argument earlier this month.”
• The Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast features a discussion of “rumors of a rift on the Supreme Court and what’s going on with President Trump’s judicial nominations.”
• The NFIB blog urges the court to review Jarreau v. South Lafourche Levee District, a regulatory-takings case in which “the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled … that a small business owner was entitled to compensation only for the fair market value of his land—notwithstanding clear and indisputable business losses that went uncompensated,” arguing that “small business owners deserve compensation when they can prove that they’ve lost goodwill or going-concern value as a direct result of a taking of their real property.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Matthew Larosiere maintain that by reviewing Silvester v. Becerra, in which the court of appeals rejected a Second Amendment challenge to the application of a California waiting-period law to gun purchasers who already own other firearms, the court could “help enable lower courts to competently move forward in developing Second Amendment jurisprudence.”
• In an op-ed for the Journal Sentinel, Paul Jossey observes that “[i]n the Supreme Court’s closely watched redistricting case, [Gill v. Whitford,] the Court’s progressive justices queried the counsel for the Wisconsin Legislature for unseemly motives, aware a favorable ruling would boost the state’s Republicans,” “[y]et these same justices dispel similar dubious motives in campaign finance cases.”
• At Take Care, Leah Litman and Lark Turner take a close look at the issues in McCarthan v. Collins, a criminal-procedure case on the court’s cert docket whose resolution will determine “whether prisoners serve extra time, possibly years, in prison absent authorization from any existing criminal statute.”

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