Friday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS NOV 16, 2018 6:56 AM

For The Baltimore Sun, Michael Dresser reports that “Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh announced Thursday that he is appealing a federal ruling that threw out the state’s congressional map for the 6th District after determining that Democratic officials unconstitutionally drew the boundary to diminish Republican influence.” Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal that “[m]ost gerrymandering lawsuits have invoked the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee, contending that lawmakers violated their duty to treat all voters equally,” but “[t]he Maryland case, in contrast, is based on First Amendment arguments that the state violated the free-speech and free-association rights of individual voters,” which “may make a difference with a right-leaning Supreme Court.” Additional coverage comes from Ann Marimow and Erin Cox for The Washington Post, who report that “[a]dvocates for redistricting reform in Maryland see Frosh’s appeal as a chance for the Supreme Court to spell out clear rules that would apply to every state in the country.” At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost explains why federal court intervention is necessary to curb political gerrymanders.

Briefly:

• At Bloomberg Law, Jordan Rubin reports that a Louisiana inmate convicted of murder by a split jury has filed a cert petition, in Ramos v. Louisiana, asking “the high court to announce that the Sixth Amendment guarantee of jury unanimity applies—or is ‘incorporated’—to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment.”
• At Governing, Graham Moomaw reports that the justices will “hear new arguments in a Virginia racial gerrymandering case[, Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill,] that could reshape the House of Delegates, offering Republicans another chance to defend the electoral map that is currently in the process of being redrawn by a lower court.”
• In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, “John-Michael Seibler joins Elizabeth Slattery to recap recent SCOTUS headlines,” and “live from the Federalist Society’s annual lawyers convention, Elizabeth sits down with Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit.”
• At Law360 (subscription required), Michael Murphy analyzes the oral argument in Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, in which the justices will decide whether a Virginia moratorium on uranium mining is pre-empted by the Atomic Energy Act, concluding that “it appears that [the Supreme Court] will reject the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning that Virginia’s purpose is irrelevant to the question of whether its ban on mining is preempted.”

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