Friday round-up
on Dec 5, 2014 at 9:47 am
Briefly:
- At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re discusses “Supreme Court signals” from Monday’s order list, which contained two statements by Justices respecting the denial of certiorari. He observes that, “[p]recisely because a signal is more ambiguously authoritative than a precedential merits decision, it’s also less binding on the Court itself. . . . This makes signals weaker medicine, but also safer and, perhaps, just what the doctor ordered.”
- At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Jessica Roberts analyzes Wednesday’s oral argument in the pregnancy discrimination case Young v. UPS; she concludes that, although “requiring employers to accommodate pregnancy could be a meaningful step in realizing the promise of the PDA for working mothers . . . whether and how such an accommodation comes to pass could have unintended consequences that both Congress and the courts must consider.”
- Also at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, David Fagundes reviews this week’s oral argument in the trademark tacking case Hana Financial v. Hana Bank; he concludes that “[t]he Justices seemed much more receptive to the notion that determining consumers’ perceptions about the ongoing commercial impressions of marks was the kind of impressionistic issue appropriate for a jury, and as a result, the tenor of the oral argument seemed more favorable to Hana Bank.”
- At FiveThirtyEightPolitics, Oliver Roeder looks at whether the Court “is becoming too cloistered, its ranks filled more and more with blindered Ivy League elite.”
- At his eponymous blog, Art Leonard reviews the current state of play in litigation challenging state bans on same-sex marriage and concludes that“perhaps the worst scenario for getting real progress expeditiously would be if the Supreme Court doesn’t grant a cert petition until too late to schedule arguments this spring. Then we all play the waiting game until next fall and might not see a final marriage equality ruling until sometime next winter.”
A friendly reminder: We rely on our readers to send us links for the round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
