Friday round-up
on Dec 16, 2016 at 7:22 am
Yesterday, the Supreme Court requested supplemental briefing in Jennings v. Rodriguez, the immigration-detention case that was argued on November 30; the court asked the parties to address constitutional issues that the lower court’s ruling had avoided and that some justices had suggested at oral argument were not properly presented in the case. Kevin Johnson reports on the order for this blog. Additional coverage comes from Lyle Denniston in his eponymous blog, who reports that using “an unusual power, the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon suddenly turned an important case on government detention of foreign nationals from a review of federal statutes into a full-blown constitutional controversy.” Commentary comes from Steve Vladeck at Just Security, who observes that in “a Term that had been lacking for high-profile, landmark constitutional cases, Jennings may just have emerged as the clubhouse leader.”
Briefly:
- At Reuters, Will Dunham and Lawrence Hurley report that incoming presidential chief of staff Reince Preibus told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Donald Trump plans to unveil his choice to fill the lingering U.S. Supreme Court vacancy around the time of his Jan. 20 inauguration” and that Trump has “not yet had any in-person interviews with potential Supreme Court nominees.”
- At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports on the court’s decision earlier this week to review TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Food Brands Group LLC, in which the justices will consider the rules governing the venue in which patent infringement lawsuits can be filed; he notes that the case “may undercut patent owners’ ability to channel cases to favorable courts.”
- At Bloomberg BNA, Kimberly Robinson reports that a “fortuitous panel assignment in the Ninth Circuit” that “allowed district court Judge Jed Rakoff to craft the decision” in an insider-trading appeal had far-reaching results: “The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the retired New York judge Dec. 6 when it held in Salman v. United States that a close relationship between a tipper and tippee can be enough to impose insider trading liability.”
- In his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that a New Mexico lawyer whose attempt to force the Senate to act on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court has been rebuffed for procedural reasons has made a last-ditch appeal to the court, filing an emergency request asking the justices to order an up-or-down Senate vote on Garland before Donald Trump’s inauguration; in his filing yesterday, the lawyer “argued that the Constitution does not permit the Senate to simply ignore a Supreme Court nomination.”
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro remarks on the spate of personal jurisdiction litigation before the court this term, noting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed amicus briefs asking the justices to review several pending cert petitions in cases that “test the circumstances under which businesses can be ‘haled into court,’ as some briefs put it, in certain states when parties have weak or nonexistent connections to those states.”
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