Tuesday round-up
Yesterday the Court issued orders from its October 16 Conference, adding four new cases (two pairs that were consolidated for a total of two hours of oral arguments) to its merits docket. Lyle Denniston covered the orders for this blog, with other coverage coming from Robin Bravender of E&E, who focuses on the grants in a pair of cases “involving a Maryland program providing incentives for new power generation. A lower court threw out the state program after judges found the incentives infringed on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s jurisdiction.” And Tony Mauro reports on the grants in the patent damages cases for the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), observing that the new cases will give the Court “another chance to revisit its often chilly relationship with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.”
Briefly:
- At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that yesterday a federal district judge declined “to allow the Obama administration to pursue an immediate appeal testing the House of Representatives’ right to sue in a dispute over federal spending under the new health care law.”
- In The Daily Beast, Eric Segall argues that the “Constitution itself has very little to do with most constitutional-law cases, and if the justices are going to exercise a strong power of judicial review, that reality is, indeed, a very good thing.”
- At Cato at Liberty, Ilya Shapiro and Trevor Burrus discuss the amicus brief that Cato filed supporting review of a San Jose ordinance that “requires developers to set aside 15 percent of their units for sale at an ‘affordable housing cost.’”
- At casetext, Colin Starger looks back at the Court’s arguments in Montgomery v. Louisiana, in which the Court is considering whether its 2012 decision prohibiting mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of murder applies retroactively, and the prospect that the Court will find that its earlier decision constituted a “watershed rule” of criminal procedure.
- At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger takes a lighter look at Missud v. Court of Appeal of California, in which the Court summarily affirmed the decision below for lack of a quorum. Discussing the petition’s “list of parties,” Scheidegger observes that “anybody who hates both Edith Jones and Stephen Reinhardt and lists them nearly adjacent in the same list is truly an equal opportunity hater.”
- At Dubitante, Justin Sadowsky has a follow-up post on last week’s oral arguments in the class-action case Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, in which he contends that our “multi-sovereign system simply is not programmed to receive a decision in favor of” Campbell-Ewald.
- Elsewhere in the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Jamie Schuman reports on the publication’s “brief of the week”: an amicus brief, filed in the challenge to a California policy of requiring non-profits there to provide the state with the names of their donors, which “argues that donors choose to remain anonymous for many reasons—ranging from religious teachings to the practical desire not to be bombarded with unwanted solicitations.”
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.
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