Last week on the Wiki

As Erin wrote last Thursday on the blog, weve just opened up five of our SCOTUSwiki case pages for editing.  For the first time, three cases Health Care Service Corp. v. Pollitt, Astrue v. Ratliff, and Jerman v. Carlisle will be open for content-editing by our readers, while two others – Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha v. Regal-Beloit Corporation and Hamilton, Chapter 13 Trustee v. Lanning can now be edited by selected legal scholars.  If youre interested in editing one of the pages, check out Erins post for instructions.

The Court was relatively quiet last week; aside from the new editing feature, so was SCOTUSwiki.  Following last Mondays cert. grants in three cases, weve updated the Wiki to reflect the new additions to the Courts docket; Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder, City of Ontario v. Quon, and Robertson v. U.S. ex rel. Watson now have pages of their own.

Looking back at the Courts ruling handed down in Alvarez v. Smith on December 8, Akin Gumps Josh Friedman wrote an opinion recap for SCOTUSblog, which was posted last Monday.  Weve updated the Alvarez Wiki page to include Joshs analysis of the Courts reasoning in remanding the case.

We also updated a number of Wiki case pages to include merits briefs that were filed last week.  Reply briefs were added to the pages for American Needle v. NFL, Conkright v. Frommert, Abbott v. Abbott, and Jerman v. Carlisle.  (DISCLOSURE: Howe & Russell attorneys are lead counsel in Abbott and Jerman).  We added petitioners briefs to the Wiki entries for Skilling v. United States, Berghuis v. Smith, and Health Care Service Corp. v. Pollitt, and we included new amicus briefs in the entries for Skilling, Kiyemba v. Obama, Berghuis v. Thompkins, and Hui v. Castaneda.

As always, weve continued to update individual Wiki pages to reflect ongoing media and blogosphere coverage of those cases.  Because the Court did not issue an opinion two weeks ago (and thus will not now do so until January), Citizens United v. FEC seems to have received the most attention, and the Wiki pages for two of the three newly granted cases Quon and Carachuri-Rosendo were updated to reflect considerable media coverage as well.