Monday round-up
on Jun 11, 2018 at 7:22 am
The countdown to the end of October Term 2017 has begun. At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports that “[t]he court is racing toward the end of its nine-month term with some of its biggest cases still to be decided, led by the fight over President Donald Trump’s travel ban”; he highlights the major cases the justices are “scheduled to decide by the end of the month.” At Howe on the Court, Amy Howe reports that the court’s four decisions last week “help to shed some light on who might (or, equally significantly, might not) be authoring the opinions that have not yet been released.” In a podcast at Constitution Daily, Jeffrey Rosen discusses “the Court’s blockbuster 2017-2018 term [with] two of America’s leading scholars of constitutional law: Michael Dorf and Ilya Shapiro.”
At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley reports that “[s]ocial conservatives are already leveraging” last week’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court ruled in favor of a Christian baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, “claiming the 7-2 ruling vindicates their positions in a range of ongoing cases.” At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston reports that the court could announce this morning whether it will review Arlene’s Flowers, Inc. v. Washington, the case of “a Washington State florist who refused for religious reasons to make custom flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding.” In an op-ed for USA Today, Barry McDonald argues that “while the Masterpiece baker technically notched a procedural win — guaranteeing a neutral tribunal to consider claims like his — there is every indication that on their substance, he went down in defeat.” Additional commentary comes from Kenneth Jost at Jost on Justice, Jim Campbell in an op-ed for The Denver Post, Jack Phillips, the cakeshop owner, in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Kate Anderson in an op-ed for The Arizona Republic, Ernie Haffner at his eponymous blog, who suggests that Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence “may portend the obstacles that plaintiffs could face in prevailing on another important LGBT rights issue — transgender bathroom access,” and Damon Root at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, who maintains that “[o]ne of the most notable things about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion … is the fact that it denied everybody what they wanted most,” and asserts that “[d]isappointing everybody is … one of the hallmarks of [Kennedy’s] jurisprudence.”
Briefly:
- At the Brennan Center for Justice, Rachel Levinson-Waldman writes that Carpenter v. United States, which asks whether the government must obtain a warrant for cell-site-location information, “involves the privacy implications of our rapidly evolving use of technology in the digital age — and the need for our laws to evolve in tandem.”
- At Yes!magazine, Fran Korten notes that “[n]o matter how the court rules” in this term’s two partisan-gerrymandering cases, Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone, “there will be plenty of continued action at the state level through the courts, the legislatures, and the ballot box.”
- In an op-ed for USA Today, Brandon Garrett urges the justices to review Dassey v. Dittman, a cert petition filed by one of the subjects of the Netflix documentary series “Making a Murderer,” and to “reaffirm the importance of carefully evaluating confessions, especially when it involves our society’s most vulnerable individuals.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
- For this blog, Andrew Hamm reports that Justice Sonia Sotomayor “promoted a new hiring plan for federal law clerks” when she spoke at the American Constitution Society’s annual convention last week.
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