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Wednesday round-up

In a speech yesterday referring to “the contentious events in Washington of recent weeks,” Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized the independence of the Supreme Court. Andrew Hamm covers Roberts’ remarks for this blog. Additional coverage comes from Josh Gerstein at Politico, Robert Barnes for The Washington Post, Brent Kendall for The Wall Street Journal, and Ariane de Vogue at CNN, who reports that “Roberts commended recent remarks by his ‘newest colleague’ during his ceremonial swearing-in at the White House,” at which Justice Brett “Kavanaugh said he would not serve ‘one party or one interest.’”

Briefly:

  • At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that “[l]awyers for the Trump Administration plan to ask the Supreme Court [today] to halt a trial set to begin in two weeks of a massive lawsuit against government environmental policy stretching back decades”; “[t]he case, Juliana v. U.S., seeks to establish a constitutional right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life.’”
  • At the ImmigrationProf Blog, Spyros Orfanos and Jessica Rofé weigh in on Nielsen v. Preap, which involves the immigration law’s mandatory detention provision, deploring “the serious negative mental health consequences of the abrupt disruptions of family life that are caused by the government’s expansive reading of the mandatory detention statute.”
  • At CNBC, Tucker Higgins reports that the latest addition to this term’s docket, Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, “could determine whether users can challenge social media companies on free speech grounds.”
  • In an episode of Bloomberg Law’s Cases and Controversies podcast, Kimberly Robinson and Jordan Rubin recap Kavanaugh’s journey to the Supreme Court bench, “discuss[] his demeanor during arguments, and highlight[] relationships to watch.”
  • At FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux explains that Supreme Court “history has a lot to tell us about how much leeway the court’s new majority has when deciding future cases on issues where a conservative ruling might spark a backlash, like abortion.”

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!

Recommended Citation: Edith Roberts, Wednesday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Oct. 17, 2018, 6:53 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/10/wednesday-round-up-444/