Friday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Dec 18, 2015 at 6:43 am

As Lyle Denniston reported yesterday for this blog, “the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday not to allow two states to sue Colorado directly in the Supreme Court over their claim of cross-border crime traced to their neighbor’s regime of legal sales of marijuana.”  Tony Mauro covers the government’s filing for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required).

Writing for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that a “rare alliance between both houses of Congress and the Obama administration is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to clear the path for American victims of Iranian-backed terrorism to recover damages from Iran’s central bank” in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, scheduled for oral argument in mid-January.  The Citizen’s Guide to the Supreme Court has a podcast on the case and the issues related to it, “including why judgments are the most important part of every civil case, the Court’s view on Separation of Powers issues, whether this is a Bill of Attainder and what is a Bill of Attainder.”  

Briefly:

• Writing for Bloomberg Politics, Greg Stohr reports that “Chief Justice John Roberts overlooked a conflict of interest when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected two appeals in an environmental-cleanup case earlier this year.”
• In Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan profiles Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner, including his disdain for the Court.
• At the Stanford Law Review Online, Daniel Townsend considers what Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, in which the Court heard oral arguments last month, “is really about: who should decide what ‘counts’ as an injury. The Court has been clear that Article III requires injury.But what is less clear is whether the Court should accept an injury Congress defines via statute as sufficient for constitutional purposes.”
• At casetext, Leah Litman argues “that the Supreme Court should exercise its discretion to weigh in on whether it has made” its decision in Johnson v. United States “retroactive by way of one of the extraordinary writs it has the power to issue.”