Friday round-up

By Amy Howe
on May 15, 2015 at 10:43 am

Next Term’s Spokeo v. Robins, in which the Court will consider whether Congress can confer standing on a plaintiff who has not suffered any concrete injury by authorizing a private right of action for a violation of a federal statute, has prompted two different commentators to weigh in. In an op-ed for The New York Times, William Baude suggests that the Court’s decision to grant review in the case “may have the surprising effect of causing the court to postpone its ruling in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, a major case about separation of powers and foreign affairs that the court is expected to decide any day now.” And at the International Municipal Lawyers Association’s Appellate Practice Blog, Lisa Soronen suggests that, even if the Court were to rule that Congress cannot confer standing, Robins “may still have recourse against Spokeo” in state court, where “standing rules tend to be more permissive.”

Briefly:

• In the Supreme Court Brief (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle looks ahead at the homestretch of the Court’s Term, the major decisions that have yet to be decided, and the prospect that the outcomes of those cases “could define” the Roberts Court “for years to come.”
• At the blog of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Lisa Soronen discusses the pair of cases in which the Court recently granted cert. to consider whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can regulate “demand response” payments to retail customers of electricity.
• At Instapundit.com, Elizabeth Price Foley criticizes a recent BuzzFeed article suggesting that Oklahoma misled the Supreme Court in the pending challenge to that state’s lethal injection protocol. She argues that it is “painfully obvious (pun intended) that Oklahoma’s only ‘sin’ was a simple citation error–no fair reader of the record below could conclude otherwise.”