Friday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JUN 2, 2017 7:33 AM

In The Washington Post, Robert Barnes and Ann Marimow report that the “Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to let it move forward with the president’s plan to temporarily ban citizens from six mostly Muslim countries, elevating a divisive legal battle involving national security and religious discrimination to the nation’s highest court.” At Politico, Josh Gerstein reports that “the Justice Department asked the high court to temporarily lift injunctions that bar officials from carrying out Trump’s directive to suspend visa issuance to citizens of six majority-Muslim countries and halt the flow of refugees to the U.S. from across the globe” and “to add the legality of the travel ban to the high court’s docket so the case would be ready for argument this fall.” Lyle Denniston reports at his eponymous blog that under “the schedule suggested by the Trump legal team, the Justices would act quickly on the issue of prompt enforcement, then decide before recessing for the summer the question of whether it will review the legality of the Trump order and, then, if review is granted, take up the cases for hearing early in the next term, which starts in October.”

Additional coverage comes from Mark Sherman and Sadie Gurman at the Associated Press, Ariane de Vogue and Laura Jarrett at CNN, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Adam Liptak in The New York Times, Pete Williams at NBC, Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed, Brooke Seipel at The Hill, BBC News, Lawrence Hurley at Reuters, and Richard Wolf at USA Today. At Balkinization, Mark Tushnet observes that the government’s requests provide the court with an “easy out”: Grant the stay of the Hawaii injunction, thereby allowing the government to proceed with its internal review of screening procedures, deny the stay of the Fourth Circuit injunction, and do whatever the heck they want about the petition for certiorari …, but set the argument for the fall,” when the “case will … almost certainly be moot.”

At The Hill, Ali Breland reports that the “tight control that tech companies have over how consumers use their products may be in jeopardy” following the court’s decision this week in Impression Products, Inc. v Lexmark International, Inc., in which the justices ruled that U.S. and overseas sales of a product extinguish the patentholder’s rights to sue for infringement. At The Least Dangerous Blog, Charlie Eastaugh describes the opinion as “another example of Chief Justice Roberts’s word-nerdery,” pointing out “Roberts’s fidelity to the original Old English(e) spellings of ‘void’ and ‘traffic.’”

At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung report that “[l]iberal activists are urging U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative with whom they often disagree, to put off any thought of retirement, fearing President Donald Trump would replace him with a jurist further to the right.” At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman examines what he concludes are “strong reasons for Justice Kennedy to try to stay on the Court through the next presidential election.”

Briefly:

• At the National Conference of State Legislatures Blog, Lisa Soronen discusses the court’s decision this week to review Husted v. A. Phillip Randolph Institute, which asks whether Ohio’s process for removing voters from registration lists violates federal election laws; she notes that the “case affects local governments as well as states.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Thomas Berry urge the court to review a case in which the appeals court affirmed a “class certification, accepting the plaintiff’s theory that a single proof of illegal structuring would prove a fraud against every one of [the defendant]’s salespeople”; they argue that “it is dangerous to hold that someone can be liable for fraud without ever having made a misrepresentation.”
• At the Washington Examiner, Ryan Lovelace reports that the “right-leaning Pacific Legal Foundation is asking the Supreme Court to review a Minnesota law that prevents people from wearing shirts, hats and other clothing that makes political statements at polling places, a law the group says violates the First Amendment.”
• At The American Prospect, Eliza Newlin Carney observes that the court’s recent decision striking down two North Carolina congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders “has sparked speculation that the high court might be poised to look at partisan gerrymandering in a more critical light.”
• For Capitol Media Services (via the Arizona Capitol Times), Howard Fischer reports that “[a]dvocates for ‘dreamers’ are urging the nation’s high court to reject Arizona’s last-ditch bid to take away their licenses to drive,” “asking the justices to leave undisturbed an appellate court ruling which concluded the state acted illegally in refusing to issue licenses to those accepted into the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.”
• In Time, Olivier Laurent offers a behind-the-scenes look at the photo shoot for the justices’ latest official photograph.

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