Wednesday round-up

AMY HOWE DEC 2, 2015 8:07 AM

Coverage of and commentary on Green v. Brennan, in which the Justices are considering when the forty-five-day clock for a federal employee to meet with an equal employment opportunity counselor (a prerequisite to filing an employment discrimination suit) begins to run, continue.  In The Huffington Post, Cristian Farias suggests that, although Chief Justice John Roberts “may as well have been playing devil’s advocate” when he described quitting a job as a “big deal,” “his comment underscores the realities of workplace discrimination and the tough decisions workers face when considering litigation over claims their employers constructively discharged them.”  In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern observes that, “as the justices tease out during an hour of oral arguments, the case is also about something else: whether an employee, once wronged, must continue to endure discriminatory treatment to keep his civil right claim alive.”

The Court also issued its first decision of the Term, ruling that a California woman’s lawsuit against the Austrian national railroad does not fall within the “commercial activity” exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.  I covered the decision for this blog, while at Forbes Michael Bobelian notes that the ruling “continued to place limitations on the ability of claimants to bring cases in domestic courts that possess nominal connections to events abroad.”

Today the Court will hear oral arguments in Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, involving ERISA and state “all payer” health care databases.  Ronald Mann previewed the case for this blog, with Tyler Vandeventer and Jason Ottomano doing the same for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

Briefly:

• In his column for Bloomberg View, Noah Feldman discusses Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, & Smith v. Manning, in which the Court is considering possible limits on state-law securities actions, and observes that what “makes it tricky to predict the outcome in this case is that the usual liberal and conservative positions produce contradiction.”
• At casetext, David Boyle responds to Laurence Tribe’s essay on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the same-sex marriage cases.
• At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen reports that voting in an election for Native Hawaiians has been extended for three weeks after Justice Anthony Kennedy temporarily blocked election officials from counting the votes.
• An op-ed in the Waco Tribune urges the Court not to delay a ruling on the Obama administration’s immigration policy, arguing that justice “delayed is justice denied — and the Supreme Court must be above such disgraceful shenanigans.”
• In an interview with Sahil Kapur of Bloomberg Politics, presidential candidate Ted Cruz promises that, if elected president, he would “be willing to spend the capital to ensure that every Supreme Court nominee that I put on the court is a principled judicial conservative.”
• At ACSblog, Brandon Garrett urges the Court to review the case of a Texas death row inmate, arguing that, at “the very least, when . . . court-appointed lawyers do not do their jobs, inmates facing execution should be able to get new ones that do not subordinate the client’s interests to their professional reputations.”

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