Monday round-up
On Friday the court granted cert in one new case, Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, which asks whether a private operator of a public-access TV channel is a “state actor” who can be sued for violations of the First Amendment. Amy Howe covers the grant for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. In a podcast at Howe on the Court, Amy discusses “the week’s orders, oral arguments, and — perhaps most importantly — emergency appeals.” The most recent episode of First Mondays (podcast) recaps last week’s cases and “take[s] a look at the so-called ‘shadow docket’ to see what the justices are up to outside of the courtroom.”
Briefly:
- For The New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that Theodore Frank, who will argue before the court later this month in Frank v. Gaos, a challenge to class-action settlement practices, is about to “join a small group of lawyers who have handled the Supreme Court arguments in their own cases.”
- In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Jeremy Dys explains why the Supreme Court should review a lower-court decision holding that a war memorial in the shape of a cross on public land in the Washington, D.C., suburbs violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
- At The Takeaway (podcast), host Amy Walter talks to Amy Howe about whether President Donald Trump has kept his campaign promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would expand Second Amendment protections and repeal Roe v. Wade.
- At the ImmigrationProf Blog, Kevin Johnson looks at last week’s oral argument in Nielsen v. Preap, which involves the immigration law’s mandatory detention provision, concluding that “the justices were troubled by what they viewed as the extreme positions posed by the opposing sides” and that perhaps “a majority could be cobbled around Justice Breyer’s suggestion that the U.S. government be permitted to subject a noncitizen to mandatory detention if taken into custody within a reasonable time of release from state custody.”
- For The Washington Post, Deborah Pearlstein reviews “The Most Dangerous Branch,” David Kaplan’s new book about the Supreme Court, in which Kaplan argues that the court “lost its legitimacy as an apolitical arbiter of the nation’s most important constitutional disputes long ago.”
- At Ikuta Matata, Sean Smith notes that in resolving a case brought by a baker who refused on religious grounds to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, the United Kingdom Supreme Court last week cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and similarly “handed victory to the objecting baker, although the British judges arguably provided a much less opaque answer to the underlying legal questions than Anthony Kennedy did in his more cautious majority opinion.”
- At Good Judgment, Ryan Adler invites court-watchers to forecast the result in Gamble v. United States, which asks whether the Supreme Court should overrule an exception to the double jeopardy clause that allows a defendant to be prosecuted for the same crime in both federal and state court.
- At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost argues that the justices’ repeated rescheduling of the cert petition in Wood v. Oklahoma, which uses statistical evidence to challenge racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty in that state, “implicates the justices as well in the racial bias all too evident in the United States’ flawed death penalty machinery.”
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