Friday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JUN 16, 2017 7:38 AM

Yesterday marked the formal investiture of Justice Neil Gorsuch at the Supreme Court. Amy Howe and Mark Walsh cover the event for this blog. At USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “the ritual was but a speed bump in a high court career that’s already off to a fast start.” In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “President Trump, who is awaiting word from the Supreme Court on the fate of his travel ban, paid his first visit to the court” for the ceremony. Additional coverage comes from Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Ariane de Vogue at CNN, Lawrence Hurley at Reuters and Robert Barnes in The Washington Post.

At The Hill, Lydia Wheeler reports that “[i]t’s decision time for the Supreme Court when it comes to President Trump’s travel ban,” and that the “justices in the coming days must decide whether to lift the temporary injunction on the ban and whether to hear the government’s appeal of lower court rulings that stopped the policy from taking effect.” At Take Care, Steve Vladeck and Leah Litman maintain that two developments on Wednesday in the entry-ban cases “de-couple the entry ban from the internal review procedures—and, in doing so, undermine (perhaps fatally) the government’s strongest arguments for the ban itself.” At Just Security, Marty Lederman explains “why, in light of the Ninth Circuit’s decision on Monday, there’s no good reason for the Court to grant any of the government’s petitions or applications.” Also at Take Care, Jim Oleske counters the government’s argument that the president’s campaign-trail statements cannot be considered in assessing the motives behind the entry ban by arguing that “the federal government itself has successfully relied upon campaign statements to demonstrate discriminatory purpose in litigation, and it has explicitly rejected the free speech chilling argument it now offers.” In National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru discusses a recent amicus brief filed by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty that argues “that the Court should decide the case under the free-exercise clause rather than the no-establishment clause of the First Amendment.”

Briefly:

• At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen notes that yesterday the court without comment denied a motion to have the mandate issued immediately in North Carolina v. Covington, in which the court vacated a district-court remedial order that had required special state elections, signaling, in his view, “that enough Justices on the Court see no urgent need for a special election in 2017,” and making it “exceedingly unlikely there could be a special election in November 2017.”
• Constitution Daily’s We the People podcast features a discussion of the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the landmark decision in which the Supreme Court held that laws banning interracial marriage are unconstitutional.
• At PrawfsBlawg, Ian Samuel outlines his concerns about “the practice of ghost-writing briefs in opposition to certiorari,” concluding that “it is calculated to mislead the Supreme Court, and that it is—for that reason—unethical.”
• At George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Alan Morrison discusses Microsoft Corp. v. Baker, in which the justices ruled this week that federal courts lack jurisdiction to review an order denying class certification after the plaintiffs have voluntarily dismissed the case with prejudice, observing that “[w]hat is most troubling is that there is no obvious and realistic avenue by which the denial of class certification can ever be raised in situations like this–and no Justice seemed to care.”
• At PrawfsBlawg, Cassandra Robertson explores the “significant ramifications” of Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, in which the justices held earlier this term that evidence that a juror relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant trumps an evidentiary rule barring post-verdict testimony about statements made during jury deliberations.

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