Thursday round-up
With the Supreme Court currently without a full slate of merits cases for the fall sittings, some coverage of the Supreme Court focuses on petitions the justices will soon consider. At Constitution Daily, Scott Bomboy looks ahead to two petitions involving dusky gopher frogs in Louisiana and salmon in Washington. In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle covers a petition on behalf of more than 174 military-service members asking the justices to decide whether the military judges who heard their appeals violated a Civil War-era statute by simultaneously holding nonmilitary offices; she notes that this would be the first review of a court-martial by the justices in over 20 years.
Briefly:
- At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen reports that a federal district court in Texas has reaffirmed its 2014 finding that the state’s voter-ID law has a discriminatory purpose, despite changes made in the interim; Hasen predicts that “ultimately this case is heading to the Supreme Court” and that its reception depends on how Justice Anthony Kennedy (assuming that he is still on the court) will view the evidence of intentional discrimination.
- Counting to 5 (podcast) features an interview with Ahilan Arulanantham, counsel for the respondents Alejandro Rodriguez and other immigrant detainees in Jennings v. Rodriguez, in which the court will once again consider whether immigrants who are detained have a right to appear in front of an immigration judge and seek their release after making payments to guarantee that they will appear at later proceedings in the same case.
- At The Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Jonathan Adler responds to criticism of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s upcoming speech at a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel; he argues that “under this logic, a judge or justice could not speak at any event hosted by a private organization at a hotel at which there is a pending labor dispute under the [National Labor Relations Act]. After all, such cases often end up in court.”
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