Monday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Apr 11, 2016 at 9:13 am

Next week the Court will hear oral arguments in the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred-action policy for some immigrants.  Lyle Denniston covered Friday’s order expanding the argument time to ninety minutes, while Mark Walsh covered the education angles of the case for Education Week. Commentary comes from David Leopold, who at Medium contends that a four-to-four tie in the case would guarantee “at least three levels of judicial chaos. Whether or not that happens rests with Chief Justice and the rest of the Supreme Court.”

On Friday, the teachers challenging the “agency fee” that they must pay to the union which represents them (but to which they do not belong) filed a petition for rehearing, asking the Court to revisit their case once a new Justice is seated.  Lyle Denniston covered the request in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association for this blog, while Mark Walsh did the same for Education Week and Ross Runkel weighs in at his eponymous blog.At Casetext, Sidney Rosdeitcher weighs in on last week’s ruling in Evenwel v. Abbott, in which the Court held that states and local governments may use total population to draw legislative districts, arguing that a ruling for the challengers “would have wrought a radical revolution that overruled 50 years of Supreme Court decisions.”  Other commentary comes from Janai Nelson, who at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights characterizes the ruling as “at once extraordinary and entirely predictable,” and from James DeLong, who at American Thinker contends that the decision represents “an advance for the cause of constitutional conservatism, and for the future of the Republic.”

Coverage of the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia comes from Seung Min Kim of Politico, who reports that President Barack Obama “has pressed Senate Republicans in numerous private conversations to fill the empty slot on the nation’s most influential court, warning that a lengthy holdup could damage the judiciary”; and Robert Barnes of The Washington Post, who reports that “the justices have been unanimous in staying out of the political upheaval that has engulfed their court.”

Commentary comes from Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, who argues that Senator Charles Grassley, “and the rest of his Republican colleagues who continue to refuse hearings and a vote on Merrick Garland, have seamlessly and shamelessly turned the entire judicial branch into their own, private constitutional snowglobe.”  In The Washington Post, Fred Hiatt contends that the Justices “are providing an example of how adults behave in a democracy.”  And in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin argues that, “[i]n Congress and at the Court, it seems, it’s the season for extremism.”

Briefly:

• At NBC News, Pete Williams reports that what “is apparently the first lawsuit to reach the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility to run for president has now been filed.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes “the most anticipated cases and decisions of the 2015-2016 Supreme Court Term.”
• At his eponymous blog, Kenneth Jost discusses a new book by Georgetown law professor David Cole, who argues that “the credit or discredit for the landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges goes not to the justices on the Supreme Court, but to engaged citizen activists who ‘made’ constitutional law through a combination of intellectual discourse and strategic political and legal advocacy.”
• An online symposium at the University of Miami Law Review anticipates the decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the challenge to the university’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process.

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.

[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on amicus briefs filed in support of the respondents in Friedrichs and Zubik.  However, I am not affiliated with the firm.]