Monday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jan 25, 2016 at 6:54 am

It has been a week since the Court announced that it would review United States v. Texas, the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred-action policy for undocumented immigrants.  Commentary on the case comes from Leon Lazaroff, who at The Street notes that the Court’s “ruling, whatever is decided, is likely to determine the tenor of debate until election day”; and from Kenneth Jost, who at Jost on Justice contends that, in granting review, “the court gave a tantalizing clue that the conservative justices are if anything eager to expand a somewhat technical issue of administrative law into a major showdown over Obama’s use of presidential power.” 

At ACSblog, David Strauss argues that, although the Justices on average overrule only one decision in constitutional cases each year, oral arguments earlier this month in “Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association made it look like a nearly 40-year-old decision called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education might be this year’s addition to that list.” And at Big Think, Steven Mazie contends that “one query during the January 11 oral hearing suggests that the Supreme Court may be ready to upend nearly four decades of mandatory ‘fair-share fees’ based on a profound misconception about the collective action problem known as free ridership.”

Briefly:

• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket, Alan Morrison weighs in on Tuesday’s opinion in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, concluding that all that “can confidently be said is that the runner avoided the defense’s first pick-off maneuver, but the defense still has a number of different moves that it can make to avoid having to litigate the class claim on the merits.”
• At the Knowledge Center, Lisa Soronen discusses last week’s opinion in Kansas v. Carr, in which the Court reinstated three inmates’ death sentences.

[Disclosure:  Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondents in Heffernan v. City of Paterson and was among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Friederichs.  However, I am not affiliated with the firm.]

 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.