Tuesday round-up
on Nov 15, 2016 at 6:31 am
Commentary on the election and the court comes from Ryan Owens, who observes in The Washington Post that “Chief Justice Roberts had a very, very good election night,” and that he “could become the first chief justice in modern history to be both the chief and the median justice — the ‘swing justice.’” At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman offers a list of federal and state court judges who may be potential Trump Supreme Court nominees based on their “policy positions – specifically those positions Trump has designated as important to his Supreme Court nominee(s) through his presidential campaign” and their ages. In Rewire, Jessica Mason Pieklo discusses the implications of Donald Trump’s victory for abortion and transgender rights in the courts, including the Supreme Court, observing that although “for progressives, the prospect of a Trump judiciary should be terrifying,” the “silver lining in this scenario is institutional inertia”: Even though “Trump and conservatives can promise to immediately overturn Roe and roll back LGBTQ rights, … the law and the courts simply don’t move that fast.”
Briefly:
- In Education Week, Mark Walsh reports on the court’s denial yesterday of a petition for certiorari filed by “a group of Kansas parents and students who object on religious grounds to the state’s adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards”; the group had argued that the standards “address religious questions by removing a ‘theistic’ viewpoint and creating a ’non-theistic worldview’ in science instruction in the public schools.”
- In Cato at Liberty, Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald urge the court to grant the pending cert petition in Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a case involving whether a federal statute can prevent New Jersey from repealing a ban on sports betting, arguing that the court should take this opportunity to “ensure that the sovereignty of the individual states—so critical to the republic’s constitutional system of checks and balances—is not further eroded by an overreaching national government.”
- In an op-ed in The National Law Journal, Gabe Roth argues for reform of judicial misconduct laws applicable to Supreme Court justices, pointing to “gaping holes in the system for monitoring judicial conduct that can and should be improved.”
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