Tuesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS OCT 10, 2017 7:07 AM

With the entry-ban cases off the calendar, today the justices will hear only one oral argument, in Hamer v. Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, in which they will consider whether appellate time limits are jurisdictional. Howard Wasserman previewed the case for this blog. Ryan Powers and Larry Blocho preview the case for Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, and another preview comes from the George Washington Law Review. Subscript offers a graphic explainer for the case.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Eric McGhee, the co-creator of an analytical measure of partisan advantage in redistricting relied on by the challengers in Gill v. Whitford, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether Wisconsin’s electoral maps are the product of an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, “correct[s] a couple misconceptions” arising out of last Tuesday’s oral argument. Additional commentary on the argument comes from Kenneth Jost at Jost on Justice, arguing that “[j]udges cannot shirk hard issues because they are hard.”

At ImmigrationProf Blog, Nancy Morawetz suggests that the oral argument in one of last week’s immigration cases, Sessions v. Dimaya, “in which the Court saw just how complicated immigration law is and how protracted proceedings can be for a person who raises serious challenges to deportation,” should have helped clarify the issues in the other, Jennings v. Rodriguez, a challenge to the prolonged detention of noncitizens without bond hearings. Another look at the argument in Dimaya comes from Ziran Zhang at Burnham & Gorokhov’s eponymous blog.

At The World and Everything in It, Mary Reichard discusses the oral arguments in Whitford and Epic Systems v. Lewis, in which the court will decide whether labor laws forbid class waivers in employment contracts. A Daily Journal podcast unpacks several of last week’s oral arguments, focusing on Whitford and Rodriguez. In an op-ed in The Hill, David Noll weighs in on one of the companion cases to Epic Systems, maintaining that “the type of agency regulation in Murphy Oil is crucial to ensuring that arbitration does not undermine federal statutes that are enforced through private litigation.”

At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley reports that tomorrow’s argument in Jesner v. Arab Bank, which asks whether corporations are liable under the Alien Tort Statute, “will have wide-ranging implications for counter-terrorism efforts and international human rights law.” In an op-ed in The Washington Times, Norman Lamont weighs in on the case, arguing that “[a]ttacking an ally by letting the U.S. courts be used to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from its principal financial institution would be a foreign policy blunder of the first order.”

In The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports on McCoy v. Louisiana, a case the court recently agreed to review that asks whether “it violate[s] the Constitution for a defense counsel to concede a client’s guilt over the accused’s express objection.” Another look at the case comes from Adam Liptak in The New York Times, who observes that “[c]onceding guilt in a capital case,” which has both a guilt phase and a punishment phase, “is sometimes the right play.”

Briefly:

• At the Florida Court Review, John Cavaliere looks at the cert petition in Truehill v. Florida, a challenge to Florida’s death-sentencing procedures that the justices considered at their conference last Friday.
• At Capital Journal, David Ganje discusses the cert petition in Coachella Valley Water District v. Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, in which “California state water agencies … are asking the Supreme Court to overturn a Circuit Court decision … [that] granted an Indian tribe water rights to groundwater underneath its reservation.”
• At his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel looks at a cert petition that asks whether “independent contractor” truck-drivers are covered by the Federal Arbitration Act.
• At the UC Davis Law Review Online, Chad Flanders assesses the cert petition in Hidalgo v. Arizona, a challenge to Arizona’s death-penalty scheme, contending that “[w]hile the argument in the Hidalgo petition is superficially appealing, it involves a basic mistake.”
• At E&E News, Amanda Reilly previews National Association of Manufacturers v. Department of Defense, which will be argued tomorrow and which “will determine the venue for future Clean Water Act disputes,” noting that the case “could have big consequences for the Trump administration as it attempts to repeal and replace the Obama-era Clean Water Rule.”
• At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps weighs in on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in which the court will consider whether public-sector unions may require non-members to help pay for collective bargaining, describing the case as “a constitutional dispute conjured more or less out of thin air over the past five years by Justice Samuel Alito.”
• At The George Washington Law Review, W. Burlette Carter revisits Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., the challenge by a transgender student to his high school’s refusal to allow him to use the boys bathroom that the Supreme Court remanded last term after the Trump administration revoked an Obama-era Department of Education guideline, predicting that “[w]hatever the outcome below in Grimm, the chances are excellent that the Supreme Court be asked to tell us the meaning of sex in the next term.”
• At The National Law Journal, Marcia Coyle reports on a recent panel discussion in which several former female assistants to the solicitor general shared stories of how attitudes towards women in the SG’s office have “‘evolved,'” “how mentors have helped guide their careers and the impact of having female justices.”

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