Monday round-up

At his eponymous blog, Art Leonard notes that “[a]t the end of May the Supreme Court had received two new petitions asking it to address the question whether the ban on employment discrimination ‘because of sex’ under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be interpreted to apply to claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation.” At Keen News Service, Lisa Keen explains that both cases are “attempting to reverse important victories won before two different federal circuit courts of appeal.”

Briefly:

• At The Hill, Lydia Wheeler reports that the long delay in the court’s disposition of the cert petition in Azar v. Garza, in which the federal government has asked the Supreme Court to nullify a lower-court ruling that cleared the way for a pregnant undocumented teenager to obtain an abortion, “could signal there’s a fight happening behind the scenes.”
• Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that two Fourth Amendment decisions this term, in Byrd v. United States and Collins v. Virginia, “represent the latest examples of a trend at the high court — dominated by conservatives — to defend individuals’ right to privacy even when they are violating the law.”
• At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley reports that “Brendan Dassey of ‘Making a Murderer’ notoriety has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case, arguing his conviction and life sentence for murder betrays the cavalier manner with which most trial courts treat coerced confessions from juveniles and the intellectually challenged,” and that “[i]t’s striking to see a significant portion of legal Washington rally to a single petition.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]

• For this blog, Andrew Hamm tests the suggestion that this term’s slow opinion output may be attributable in part to Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tendency to write separately, concluding that “at least so far, … Gorsuch does not in fact write separately more often than other justices,” but that “[w]hen he does write, … he fills out more pages.”
• Advice & Consent (podcast) discusses “the newsiness surrounding retirement rumors” and offers other “insight on the future of the supreme court.”
• At The Daily Signal, Elizabeth Slattery and Scott French weigh in on last week’s cert denial in Planned Parenthood of Arkansas & Eastern Oklahoma v. Jegley, a challenge to an Arkansas law regulating medication abortions, calling the case “another example of the long, deadly shadow that the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions have cast over law, medicine, and society.”
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost looks at Justice Clarence Thomas’ solo concurrence in last week’s Fourth Amendment case, Collins v. Virginia, in which Thomas argued “that the oft-criticized exclusionary rule for suppressing illegally obtained evidence has no historical basis and the Supreme Court no authority to require states to adopt it”; Jost maintains that “abolition of the exclusionary rule would surely encourage police officers to give less regard to the sometimes difficult-to-discern Fourth Amendment rules as to what amounts to an ‘unreasonable’ search.”
• At Just Security, Kristina Daugirdas writes that next term, in Jam v. International Finance Corporation, the court “may pare back” international organizations’ immunity from suit, and that “[t]he implications would be significant—not just for the IFC, but for international organizations across the board.”
• In an op-ed for The Hill, Ally Coll Steele and Ryan Park argue that the court’s recent decision in Epic Systems v. Lewis, holding that arbitration clauses in employment contracts that require employees to forgo class and collective actions are enforceable, demonstrates why federal action “banning nondisclosure and arbitration clauses for sexual harassment claims in employment contracts” is “critical.”
• Also in an op-ed for The Hill, Kristin Waggoner weighs in on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court will decide whether the First Amendment bars Colorado from requiring a baker to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, arguing that the baker’s “willingness to serve gays and lesbians while declining to design custom cakes that celebrate same-sex marriage is not discrimination against LGBT individuals.”

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