Monday round-up
on Apr 25, 2016 at 5:56 am
Today the Justices will hear oral arguments in two cases. Ronald Mann previewed Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, involving the standard for awarding attorney’s fees in a copyright case, for this blog, while law students Alexander Gray and Tina Zheng do the same for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.
In his preview for this blog, Ronald Mann describes Monday’s other case, Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee, as a “potential landmark patent case”; law students Sonia Gupta and Gerard Salvatore have Cornell’s preview. And at STAT, Dylan Scott explains why, although the case, “on its face, has nothing to do with prescription drugs,” the Court’s ruling in it “could, nonetheless, leave a big mark on medicine.”On Wednesday the Court will hear its last scheduled oral argument of the Term: McDonnell v. United States. Lyle Denniston previewed the challenge by former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell to his fraud convictions for this blog, while Lisa Soronen does the same at Knowledge Center.
Commentary on United States v. Texas, the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred-action policy for some undocumented immigrants, in which the Justices heard oral arguments last Monday, comes from Angela Morrison, who at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights argues that “Justice Sotomayor’s summary of Texas’ alleged harm, that basically, ‘I’m going to do this when it makes no sense,’ is also applicable to the position taken by those who oppose immigration reform at all costs, even that of children’s well-being”; and Shobha Wadhia, who at Immigration Impact argues that “Justice Kennedy’s discomfort with the notion that the Executive Branch is dictating policy to the Legislative Branch is simply not the case here.” And in the Journal on Migration and Human Security, Donald Kerwin and Robert Warren provide “a statistical portrait of the intended direct beneficiaries of DAPA, DACA, and DACA-plus.”
At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket, Alan Morrison analyzes last week’s decision in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, in which the Court upheld a statute which directs that Iranian assets go to terror victims and their families; he observes that, “on the legal issues, there was substantial agreement between the two opinions, although in their conclusions they were very far apart.” Emily Hammond does the same for the power plant preemption case Hughes v. Talens Energy Marketing, arguing that the ruling “combines an easily predictable result on the merits with significant uncertainty for states going forward.”
Briefly:
- In Salon, Anna Arceneaux urges the Court to review the case of Bobby James Moore – who, she says, “has a lifelong intellectual disability, yet he sits on Texas’s death row because the courts there used John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” to decide his fate.”
- At the NCSL Blog, Lisa Soronen discusses Wednesday’s decision in Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, observing that the ruling “confirms that state and local governments don’t have to apportion legislative districts perfectly, but they do need a good reason for failing to doing so. But we knew that before.”
- At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman looks back at last week’s oral arguments in the Fair Labor Standards Act case Encino Motorcars v. Navarro, noting one “particularly interesting” aspect of the case: “the Justices and attorneys engaged in a more general conversation about everyday grammatical rules that can aid in statutory construction.”
- Last week Randy Barnett and Robert Percival discussed (video) Barnett’s new book, The Republican Constitution, including the reaction by conservatives to the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia.
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