Friday round-up

Briefly:

• At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie notes that a study of “more than 3,000 hours of audio recordings of Supreme Court oral arguments between 1982 and 2014” suggests that “[t]he pitch of judges’ voices conveys more about their eventual votes than ‘legal, political and textual information.’”
• At Above the Law, David Lat remarks that the fact that “[t]his week, Justice [Anthony] Kennedy finished hiring his full complement of four law clerks for October Term 2018” “doesn’t guarantee that Justice Kennedy is staying past the current Term, but it certainly suggests that he’s open to the possibility.”
• For the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Robert Patrick reports on a cert petition filed by a Missouri inmate who “argues that a 2010 decision that prohibited a sentence of life without parole for juveniles … should also apply to those whose lengthy prison terms effectively mean the same thing.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes oral-argument transcripts to conclude that “Justice [Neil] Gorsuch may ask attorneys to ‘help’ him on a more frequent basis than any prior justice in the history of the Court.”

• At PrawfsBlawg, Richard Re looks at Hughes v. United States, a recent cert grant that raises questions about “’the Marks rule’—the principle that precedent can be found in the ‘position taken by those members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds,’” used by courts applying rulings that lack a majority opinion; Re argues that in Hughes, “the parties—and the Justices—should consider whether the Marks rule is worth having at all.”
• At Balkinization, Marty Lederman unpacks the solicitor general’s recent brief requesting a stay of a lower-court order that required a pregnant teenager to be released from immigration custody in order to obtain an abortion.

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