Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS APR 2, 2018 7:07 AM

At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports that the “Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to drop a pending case over government access to emails stored overseas, saying a new federal law has stripped the case of any practical significance.” Additional coverage of the solicitor general’s motion in United States v. Microsoft Corp., comes from Ellen Nakashima for The Washington Post. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondent in this case.]

At the Pacific Legal Foundation blog, Anthony Francois weighs in on last week’s oral argument in Hughes v. United States, which “asks the Supreme Court to provide better guidance to the lower courts on what to do when the Supreme Court can’t agree on a legal principle,” arguing that “[h]ow the Court decides Hughes has direct implications for how the lower courts apply the fractured decision in Rapanos v. United States,” in which “a majority of the Court struck down EPA and Army Corps regulations categorically defining all tributaries as ‘navigable waters’ under the Clean Water Act, but disagreed [on] why.” At In a Crowded Theater, Erica Goldberg suggests that “the Court should apply the “logical subset” rule to govern fractured opinions in most cases, except if the logical subset rule produces absurd results.”

At ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser maintains that this term’s partisan-gerrymandering cases demonstrate that “[t]he Chief Justice of the United States is allergic to political science,” asserting that “[h]e harbors numerous misconceptions about how voters behave and how they think,” misconceptions [that] often form the basis for his judicial decisions.” At the Election Law Blog, Nicholas Stephanopolous asserts that in one of the cases, Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to Wisconsin’s statewide electoral map, “the Court can’t punt … by holding that Mr. Whitford (and other plaintiffs in his position) lack standing,” because “[e]ven if they lack it, other plaintiffs don’t,” and “under the Court’s precedents, those other plaintiffs are free to challenge the district map as a whole.”

Briefly:

• At the Associated Press, Jessica Gresko reports that “drugmakers are asking the Supreme Court to step in[to]” a dispute over the size of prescription eye drops.
• Mark Oswald reports for the Albuquerque Journal that the Cato Institute “is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to use a lawsuit over a fatal shooting by a New Mexico State Police officer to roll back the ‘qualified immunity’ that protects police from liability.”
• At CNN, Ariane de Vogue reports that as speculation about the possible retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy “ramps up again, court watchers wonder what went into his calculation for staying on the bench last term — and if anything’s changed since then.”
• In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Waldman criticizes “[r]etired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens[‘] … call to repeal the 2nd Amendment,” labeling the proposal “politically unwise and legally unnecessary.”
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost considers the history of Supreme Court impeachments and concludes that “the country and the Court itself cannot withstand another traumatic episode in the politicization of the nation’s last, best hope for equal justice under law.”
• In an op-ed for The Hill, Peter Margulies and Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia weigh in on Trump v. Hawaii, a challenge to the latest version of the Trump administration’s entry ban, arguing that the ban is “an effort to resurrect the national origin quotas that the 1965 Congress discarded.”

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