Friday round-up

Briefly:

• At CNN, Joan Biskupic lists five reasons why Justice Anthony Kennedy may not retire this term, “beginning with the fact that he has always lived for this.”
• In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates “review the RBG documentary and chat with SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe”; they also “break down recent decisions on sports betting, shackling, and more.”
• At his eponymous blog, Michael Dorf suggests that Justice Clarence Thomas “deserves some credit for calling attention to the Court’s failure to fully justify or consistently approach severability issues” in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, in which the justices struck down the federal law that bars states from legalizing sports betting, but he maintains that Thomas “has not thought through his own commitments or even his own votes in recent severability cases.”
• In two posts at the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, here and here, Bernard Bell takes a close look at Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido, in which the justices will decide next term whether the 20-employee minimum in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act applies to state and local governments, concluding “that application of such numerosity requirements [to] governmental entities is not particularly appropriate.”

• Counting to 5 (podcast) looks at “two newly granted cases and five new opinions in argued cases.”
• At Ikuta Matata, law student Sean Smith tips his hat to Judge Sandra Ikuta of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who he says showed “real talent for reprimanding her colleagues” when she dissented in two cases that were reversed this term by the Supreme Court.
• At ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser argues that Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion this week (joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch) in Byrd v. United States, in which the court held that a driver can object under the Fourth Amendment to a search of a rental car even when he is not listed on the rental agreement, “suggests a wholesale rewrite of the Supreme Court’s decisions governing when police are allowed to intrude on a suspect’s privacy” and “could throw federal law enforcement into chaos.”
• At Law360, Michael Waldman and Ralph Mayrell note that “at least six petitions raising [False Claims Act] issues currently remain on the docket” and they highlight three that “appear to have already piqued the court’s interest.”
• At Howe on the Court, Amy Howe reports that “[w]hen the justices return to the bench next fall after their summer recess, a case involving computer giant Apple may very well be on their merits docket,” because “[l]ast week the U.S. government recommended that the Supreme Court grant review in a case arising from allegations that the company has monopolized the market to distribute apps for its iPhones.”
• The Associated Press reports that “[t]he Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary “RBG” is turning into a mini box office phenomenon,” “crack[ing] the top 10 this weekend with $1.2 million from only 180 screens nationwide.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up.  If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!