Friday round-up
on Nov 18, 2016 at 7:09 am
Yesterday, Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opening remarks at a Federalist Society convention honoring the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Andrew Hamm covered the event for this blog. Additional coverage comes from Lawrence Hurley at Reuters, who reports that Alito “laid out a possible agenda for the U.S. Supreme Court if it regains its conservative majority as expected after Donald Trump takes office, citing gun rights and religious freedom as among key issues it will tackle in the coming years.”
In The Economist, Steven Mazie reports on the factors guiding Donald Trump’s choice of a replacement for Scalia, noting that on “the campaign trail, under pressure to display conservative bona fides, Mr Trump shared more about his plans for the nation’s highest court than any presidential candidate has ever divulged,” and that “Mr Trump seems to have two priorities: protecting gun rights and curbing abortion.” At Bloomberg, Kimberly Robinson reports that a “full U.S. Supreme Court bench is likely by the end of the current term”; she observes that the election results may cause some high-profile cases to “disappear from the court’s docket altogether.” In Salon, Amanda Marcotte predicts that a Trump Supreme Court appointee will “likely result in a majority hostile to labor unions,” and that Republican “efforts to destroy organized labor will get a big assist in the courts.” At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that a federal court judge in Washington yesterday threw out a lawsuit by a New Mexico lawyer seeking to force a Senate vote on the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, ruling that the lawyer lacked standing to bring the suit because he “could not lay claim to an injury personal to himself.” In an op-ed in USA Today, Ilann Maazel argues that “Senate Democrats should vow to filibuster any Trump Supreme Court nominee until Garland gets an up-or-down vote in the Senate.”
At Bloomberg, Patrick Gregory offers five things to know about Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, who is on Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees, describing Willett as “a champion of ‘economic liberty.’” And in The Texas Observer, Eric Benson provides an in-depth profile of Willett, noting the justice’s “personal warmth and up-from-the-bootstraps biography” as well as his embrace of “‘judicial engagement,’ a more aggressive approach to reviewing (and sometimes declaring unconstitutional) government regulations, particularly those that relate to economic and property rights,” than “the long-sacrosanct conservative doctrine of ‘judicial restraint.’”
Briefly:
- Lyle Denniston reports in his eponymous blog that the court yesterday dismissed two of the cases on its December docket, Visa, Inc. v. Stoumbos and Visa, Inc. v. Osborn, which had been consolidated for argument on December 7, and which involved “a high-stakes antitrust battle against the two biggest credit card companies, Visa and MasterCard, over fees charged for using ATM machines,” “because the attorneys for the companies involved had switched their argument as the case moved toward a hearing.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondents in these cases.]
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