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Thursday round-up

Briefly:

  • In an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, Bradley Smith urges the court to grant review in a campaign finance case challenging restrictions on contributions to state and local political parties, arguing that it “makes no sense to send state and local parties to the back of the bus when it comes to political campaigns.”
  • In The Atlantic, Garrett Epps wonders what Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is rumored to be considering retirement from the court and whose “devotion to America” and “true allegiance to the Constitution” are clear, thinks a “president … who has shown no understanding of judicial independence” might do “with the gift of Kennedy’s seat.”
  • At his eponymous blog, Sheldon Nahmod looks at County of Los Angeles v. Mendez, a Fourth Amendment civil action stemming from a police search that resulted in a shooting; he observes that there “have been other section 1983 proximate cause cases before the Supreme Court, but this one is different because it raises reasonable foreseeability (and superseding cause) as the proximate cause test in a split-second decision making setting.”

  • In The Staten Island Advance, Daniel Leddy marks the 50th anniversary of In re Gault, a Supreme Court decision that “accorded accused children constitutional rights that had been routinely denied to them on the theory that juvenile delinquency proceedings, being rehabilitative in purpose, were civil in nature,” and that “remains the most important pronouncement ever made by the Supreme Court on children and the law.”
  • In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that President Donald Trump’s nominee for solicitor general, Noel Francisco, “sailed through” yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “even though some senators appeared preoccupied by [the president]’s Tuesday firing of FBI director James Comey.”

Remember, we rely exclusively on our readers to send us links for our round-up.  If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.

Recommended Citation: Edith Roberts, Thursday round-up, SCOTUSblog (May. 11, 2017, 7:35 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/05/thursday-round-up-374/