Wednesday round-up
on Jan 4, 2017 at 6:29 am
Briefly:
- Constitution Daily highlights ten Supreme Court cases to watch in 2017.
- The Open File looks at Turner v. United States and Overton v. United States, “two consolidated cases involving allegations that the government suppressed exculpatory evidence in a decades-old murder prosecution in Washington, DC,” detecting “early signs that the Supreme Court will forego this opportunity to provide guidance and clarity to litigants and courts struggling to guard against prosecutorial misconduct.”
- In The Economist, Steven Mazie notes that the “unheralded but important role of the district-court judge was the theme of Chief Justice John Roberts’ end-of-year report,” but that “in his homily, the chief justice judiciously ignored the elephant in his own courtroom—the empty chair Senate Republicans successfully blockaded after Antonin Scalia’s death last February” — and “papered over the political fight concerning dozens of lower-court judicial nominations Barack Obama has submitted for the Senate’s advice and consent”; Mazie concludes that federal court vacancies have become “ground zero in the partisan struggle over control of the third branch of government.”
- At Politico, Shane Goldmacher and Josh Gerstein report on Donald Trump’s progress towards filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court, stating that “Scalia’s replacement offers Trump and the conservative movement the best chance for an unabashedly rock-ribbed replacement because it would not fundamentally shift the court’s balance of power,” and that while “Scalia’s seat is the only current opening, Trump’s advisers are plotting how to fill that vacancy in tandem with the next one.”
- At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Devin Watkins weigh in on Packingham v. North Carolina, which asks whether a ban on social media use by sex offenders violates the First Amendment, arguing that singling “out this speech for prosecution—without any allegation that it relates to conduct or motive—should earn the Tar Heel State a big ‘dislike’ from the Supreme Court.”
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