Monday round-up
For this blog, Andrew Hamm reports that the Supreme Court will operate as usual for the foreseeable future despite the government shutdown. At The National Law Journal, (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro confirms that “the court almost never closes when other agencies do.”
On Friday the justices agreed to review Trump v. Hawaii, a challenge to the latest version of the Trump administration’s entry ban. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “[t]hroughout the lengthy legal battle, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court has loomed as Trump’s best hope.” Additional coverage comes from Brent Kendall for The Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Hurley at Reuters, Ariane de Vogue at CNN, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Mark Walsh at Education Week’s School Law Blog, Adam Liptak at The New York Times, Lydia Wheeler at The Hill, BBC News, and Robert Barnes for The Washington Post. At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that “[b]y accepting review at this point in the Court’s term, the Justices gave themselves the opportunity to issue a final decision before the current term ends, probably in late June.”
Fix the Court urges the court to provide live audio of the oral argument. At the Constitutional Law Prof Blog, Ruthann Robson expects that “recent statements allegedly made by the President regarding immigration will [likely] be raised” before the court. At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps explains how the “Chinese Exclusion” cases, “the foundation of the ‘plenary power’ doctrine,” “embody the idea that Congress can do anything it wants in immigration, Constitution be damned,” and underlie “the administration’s legal claims that Trump’s preferences as to immigrant streams may not be reviewed by the courts.” Additional commentary comes from Howard Wasserman at PrawfsBlawg.
Briefly:
- At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie discusses the federal government’s highly unusual request for Supreme Court review of a lower-court decision preventing the federal government from dismantling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, even though the appeals court has not yet ruled on the case, remarking that “[t]here is a lot of chutzpah packed into the DoJ brief.”
- At the Pacific Legal Foundation blog, Caleb Trotter urges the justices to review a case in which, if the judgment below is allowed to stand, “the Ninth Circuit’s anomalous ‘general rule’ that only defendant agencies—and not intervenor-defendants—can appeal adverse district court remand orders will undermine an important safeguard from abuse under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
- A Daily Journal podcast features “competing takes on whether Ohio’s approach” to purging inactive voters from its rolls, at issue in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, “violated federal law.”
- At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and others highlight the amicus brief the Institute has filed in United States v. Microsoft Corp., which asks whether the government can gain access from email providers to data that is stored overseas, urging the court to “affirm that the right of people to be secure in their papers and effects has not been abrogated by modern technology and that the long arm of the law shall not extend across all oceans without express authorization from the legislature.”
- At his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel outlines “the essential points” in AFSCME’s brief in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in which the court will consider whetheran Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment.
- In an op-ed for The Hill, 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 “this law isn’t truly about ‘Reproductive FACTs’ but about free speech.”
- At PrawfsBlawg, Michael Mannheimer looks at the oral argument in Byrd v. United States, which asks whether a driver has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a rental car when he is not an authorized driver, remarking that “Justice Gorsuch seems to be filling Justice Scalia’s shoes in advocating for a property-based notion of what constitutes a search.”
- Counting to 5 (podcast) offers two new episodes: One “review[s] eleven newly granted Supreme Court cases that will likely be heard during the Court’s April oral argument session,” and the other features an interview with one of the oral advocates in Class v. United States, which asks whether a guilty plea waives a defendant’s right to appeal the constitutionality of the law.
- At Politico, Josh Gerstein and Lorraine Woellert report that “[p]aramedics were called to the Washington home of Justice Sonia Sotomayor Friday morning, but a Supreme Court spokeswoman said the justice was not hospitalized and went to work Friday after being treated for low blood sugar.”
- At BuzzFeedNews, Chris Geidner reports that “[t]hirteen years into the job, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. … has shifted to a more moderate position among the conservative justices on the court, a small change with potentially dramatic consequences.”
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