Friday round-up

Briefly:

• In the National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that Fane Lozman “has been a thorn in the side of the city council of Riviera Beach, Florida, for more than a decade[, a]nd now—for the second time in five years—his legal battles with the city have captured the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
• At Bloomberg Law, Kimberly Robinson reports that “[a]n untimely recusal from Justice Elena Kagan has placed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ethics rules—or the lack of them—under fire again.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and others urge the justices to review a challenge to a class-action settlement by a class member who asserts that her claim was diluted by the inclusion in the class of “members who have no real chance of recovery at trial,” calling on “courts [to] effectively police the class-action system to ensure that all citizens are afforded constitutional due process.”
• In Take Care’s Versus Trump podcast, Charlie Gerstein and Jason Harrow “respond to a discussion on the Supreme Court podcast First Mondays regarding the government’s recent filing in the Hargan v. Garza abortion case.”

• Ropes & Gray offers a video discussion of two patent cases that will be argued in the December session, Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, a challenge to the constitutionality of inter partes review, a process used to determine the validity of existing patents, and SAS Institute Inc. v. Matal, which involves the mechanics of the inter partes review process.
• At National Review, James Gottry weighs in on National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a First Amendment challenge by crisis-pregnancy centers to a California law requiring disclosures about the availability of publicly funded family-planning services, including contraception and abortion, arguing that “[p]ro-life pregnancy-care centers should not be forced to contradict their core message.”
• At Casetext, David Boyle explains why “petitioners Phillips and his cake shop have some heavy lifting to do” in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court will decide whether the First Amendment bars Colorado from requiring a baker to create a cake for a same-sex wedding.

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