Here’s a round-up of Supreme Court-related news and commentary from around the web:
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion, please send it to roundup@scotusblog.com. Thank you!
This article looks at the Supreme Court’s election law jurisprudence under the Roberts court. Supreme Court opinions and applications were searched from 2005 through the present for the term “election.” All cases were examined, and any that related to elections or voting procedures were maintained in the dataset. Cases were broken down across several issues including voting rights and procedures, vote counting, campaign finance and primaries. Several cases also dealt with First Amendment issues surrounding elections in the vein of Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, but these were not used because they dealt with peripheral issues rather than with voter participation. The breakdown of case types by frequency is as follows.
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John Elwood reviews Monday’s relists.
If case numbers keep growing at the current rate, things will quickly become unsustainable. That’s right: Experts warn that if present trends continue, the Supreme Court will be relisting 8,388,608 cases per week by the end of June.
The court on Friday granted cert in last week’s single new relist, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, 20-107, presenting the question whether a California regulation that allows union organizers to enter the property of growers constitutes an uncompensated per se taking of property under the Fifth Amendment. But alarmingly, the court replaced it with two relists, setting it on a course of unsustainable exponential growth. Continue reading »
Here’s a round-up of Supreme Court-related news and commentary from around the web:
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion, please send it to roundup@scotusblog.com. Thank you!
The House Committee on the Judiciary on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to remove its dispute with the Department of Justice over secret materials from the Mueller investigation from the court’s December argument calendar. The committee told the justices that once a new Congress and President-elect Joe Biden take office in January, it “will have to determine whether it wishes to continue” its efforts to gain access to the materials at the center of the case now before the court, Department of Justice v. House Committee on the Judiciary.
The dispute arose last year, after Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his report on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election to Attorney General William Barr. Barr released a redacted version of the report in April 2019, but a few months later the committee went to court in Washington, D.C., where it asked a federal judge for an order that would require the Department of Justice to disclose the redacted portions of the Mueller report, along with secret grand jury transcripts and materials, for use in the committee’s impeachment investigation. Continue reading »
This week is already shaping up to be a busy one on the Supreme Court’s unofficial coronavirus docket. The justices on Monday rejected an emergency request from incarcerated individuals at a Texas geriatric prison who had asked the court to reinstate stricter safety precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the prison. Also on Monday, a group of Jewish organizations came to the court to challenge New York’s limits on attendance at religious services — just four days after the Catholic diocese of Brooklyn challenged those same limits. The state’s response to the Catholic diocese’s challenge is due Wednesday, and its response to the Jewish organizations’ challenge is due Friday. Continue reading »
For the past several months, Election Law at Ohio State and SCOTUSblog have teamed up to track significant election-related lawsuits with the potential to reach the Supreme Court and affect the presidential election. Now, two weeks after Election Day, litigation over the outcome of the election is rapidly diminishing, but it hasn’t yet completely disappeared. Still scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 17, is a hearing in the Trump campaign’s federal-court lawsuit seeking to delay certification of the popular vote in Pennsylvania. The remaining litigation almost certainly will not have a practical effect on the election’s outcome for a variety of reasons (it would be necessary for President Donald Trump to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s apparent victory in three states, not enough ballots are at stake even assuming the merits of the legal theories raised, factual evidence is lacking on many of the claims made, and so forth). But as others have observed, there are still some legal principles at stake before this ends up just a matter for the history books. Continue reading »
Four days after the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn asked the justices to block enforcement of a New York executive order restricting attendance at houses of worship, two Orthodox Jewish synagogues came to the Supreme Court to make a similar request. Arguing that their neighborhoods and religious institutions had been “targeted,” the challengers – which also included two rabbis and an Orthodox Jewish organization – told the justices that the “guilt-by-religious-association restrictions” imposed by the order “have made it impossible for” them to “exercise their religious faith.” Continue reading »
The Supreme Court on Monday afternoon rejected a request from two inmates at high risk for complications from COVID-19 to reinstate an order by a federal district court that would require Texas prison officials to take basic safety precautions to combat the virus. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from that ruling, penning an 11-page opinion – joined by Justice Elena Kagan – in which she worried that Monday’s order “will lead to further, needless suffering” at a prison where 20 inmates have already died as a result of the virus.
The request was filed by Laddy Valentine and Richard King, inmates at the Wallace Pack Unit, a geriatric prison in southeast Texas. Valentine is 69, King is 73, and both suffer from chronic health conditions – such as diabetes and high blood pressure – that put them at a higher risk for serious illness and death from the coronavirus. They went to federal court earlier this year, where they argued that the failure to protect them from the coronavirus violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Continue reading »
SCOTUSblog and Goldstein & Russell, P.C. are seeking to hire a full-time employee to serve as firm manager for Goldstein & Russell, P.C., and deputy manager of SCOTUSblog. The position is based in Bethesda, Maryland, and requires occasional in-person work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading »
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