Friday round-up
on Sep 15, 2017 at 7:17 am
At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston looks at the factors that may underlie the Supreme Court’s one-sentence order on Wednesday denying a request to expedite review of a partisan-gerrymandering case from Maryland, Benisek v. Lamone. Additional coverage of the court’s order in Benisek comes from Steve Lash in The Daily Record.
In an op-ed at Bloomberg View, Noah Feldman discusses Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which asks whether the First Amendment prevents a state from requiring a baker to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, maintaining that “it would be a fundamental mistake for the court to hold that the baker’s artistry exempts them from anti-discrimination law.” At his eponymous blog, Ed Mannino suggests some approaches that would enable the court to “craft[] a narrow opinion which will garner the greatest number of justices [to] join it,” while at Casetext, David Boyle looks for a “‘compromise’ solution to the Masterpiece problem.” The editorial board of The Washington Post also weighs in on the case, arguing that “there is little reason to believe that wedding guests would attribute to the cake baker an endorsement of the festivities as a whole — or that a reasonable guest might believe that of the baker rather than of the wedding hairdresser, the caterer or the hotel providing the venue.”
Briefly:
- At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Walter Olson salutes Edith Windsor, “a heroine of property rights as well as constitutional protection for gay persons,” the plaintiff in the successful challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act who died this week at the age of 88.
- In The National Law Journal, Marcia Coyle reports that Justice Elena Kagan recently praised the “’extremely high caliber’” of the Supreme Court Bar; the justice observed that “[m]any of the arguments … are made by ‘repeat players’ who ‘really know the court, who know the process of arguing before the court, who know what it is we like, who know what they should be doing, what they shouldn’t be doing.’”
- At Bloomberg BNA, Jordan Rubin reports on the varied array of groups that have filed amicus briefs in Carpenter v. United States, the Fourth Amendment cell-site-location-records case, pointing to “some distinctive filings submitted on Carpenter’s behalf [that] call attention to issues that may not immediately come to mind when thinking of the search and seizure question presented by his case.”
- At Fa on First, Wen Fa notes that as it prepares to begin its new term, “[t]he Court already has one big First Amendment case on its docket, and might be adding a few more in the next few weeks.” At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog, Fa urges the court to grant one of these First Amendment cert petitions, a challenge to Minnesota’s ban on political apparel at polling places across the state.
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