Friday round-up
Reid Wilson reports for The Hill that Cooper v. Harris, in which the justices upheld a lower court’s ruling that North Carolina relied too heavily on race in drawing the boundaries of two congressional districts, “is being hailed as a victory for voting rights advocates — though some caution that the path ahead for Democrats fighting gerrymandering has just become more treacherous.” In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that a “Supreme Court that prides itself on trying to remain above politics will be forced to rule soon on what one justice calls the ‘always unsavory’ process of drawing election districts for partisan gain,” noting that a “case headed its way from Wisconsin, along with others from Maryland and North Carolina, will present the court with a fundamental question about political power: How far can lawmakers go in choosing their voters, rather than the other way around?”
Briefly:
- At ESPN, David Purdum reports that the U.S. solicitor general’s office “filed a brief on Wednesday recommending that the Supreme Court decline to review New Jersey’s latest effort to offer legal sports betting,” and that the “brief is the latest blow to New Jersey’s lengthy battle with NCAA, NFL and other professional sports leagues.”
- In the Los Angeles Times, David Savage reports that in Sessions v. Binderup, a Second Amendment case that is among the cert petitions the court considered at its private conference yesterday, “the Justice Department under Trump has embraced the same position … that was adopted under President Obama: to defend strict enforcement of a long-standing federal law that bars convicted criminals from ever owning a gun, even when their crimes did not involve violence.”
- At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Devin Watkins urge the court to review a case that asks whether, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the owner of online information can authorize a third party to access that information on a social networking site; they argue that “Internet companies need clear legal rules so they know what they can do nationwide without the threat of civil liability or criminal prosecution.”
- At USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that Alabama death-row inmate Thomas Arthur, whose execution had been delayed seven times, was put to death by lethal injection early this morning after the Supreme Court “denied Arthur’s last-minute petition seeking yet another reprieve with just minutes to go”; “Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the court’s otherwise unsigned decision to allow the execution to go forward.”
- A podcast at Take Care looks at developments in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., the case of a transgender high school student challenging his school’s refusal to let him use the boys’ bathroom, following the court’s decision earlier this year to remand the case to the lower court.
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