Wednesday round-up
on Sep 20, 2017 at 7:15 am
Yesterday the Senate confirmed Noel Francisco as solicitor general by a vote of 50-47. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. Additional coverage comes from Ryan Lovelace in The Washington Examiner, Alex Swoyer in The Washington Times and Jessie Kokrda Kamens at Bloomberg Big Law Business.
At the Associated Press, Mark Sherman reports that although “President Donald Trump’s travel ban offers the Supreme Court the chance to make a major pronouncement on the president’s power over immigration, … the case also could vanish into the legal ether, and that may be what a majority of the court is hoping for.” At Take Care, Joshua Matz, introducing excerpts from an amicus brief filed in the entry-ban cases on behalf of a group of constitutional law scholars, argues that “the President’s public statements—before and after inauguration—about why he issued his executive order” constitute “admissions of anti-Muslim animus.”
Briefly:
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that former solicitor general Paul Clement has been tapped to argue on behalf of the employers in in a closely watched trio of U.S. Supreme Court cases that question whether workplace arbitration agreements that ban class actions violate federal labor laws,” after “[t]he companies and their lawyers were apparently at an impasse over which of their original high court lawyers should make the Oct. 2 arguments.”
- At truthdig, Bill Blum discusses partisan-gerrymandering case Gill v. Whitford, concluding that “[h]ow the court ultimately rules will determine whether the legacy of the Earl Warren on reapportionment will be honored and extended or brought crashing to an unceremonious close.”
- At ACSblog, Ann Hodges looks at the pending cert petition in Janus v. AFSCME, “a case challenging the only reliable source of union funds,” maintaining that the petition “rehashes the same arguments rejected by the Supreme Court forty years ago in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and downplays subsequent legal developments that support reaffirmation of the decision in Abood.”
- At The American Prospect, Elliot Mincberg argues that a “ruling in favor of the bakery” in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which stems from a baker’s refusal to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, “would not only undermine the marriage equality protections in Obergefell and weaken statutes combatting anti-LGBTQ discrimination, but it would also authorize a much broader ‘religious exemption to civil rights laws that could allow discrimination’ based on gender, nationality, race and other grounds.”
- At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern, observing that Supreme Court justices often “attempt to play oracle,” provides “a roundup of the justices’ most famous predictions and a status update on whether they have yet come to pass.”
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