Thursday round-up

Briefly:

• At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley notes that “Chief Justice John Roberts has made common cause with the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc as late, breaking with his conservative colleagues on cases relating to abortion, the death penalty and President Donald Trump’s revised rules for asylum seekers,” and that “[i]n isolation, it’s difficult to know what to make of the chief’s votes.”
• In an op-ed for Fox News, Kristen Waggoner hopes that the recent settlement between Colorado and Christian baker Jack Phillips, whose refusal on religious grounds to make a cake for a same-sex wedding led to one of last terms highest-profile cases, “signals an end to state-sponsored hostility toward religion in Colorado and a new era of tolerance and respect toward people of faith.”
• At Just Security, Kristina Daugirdas discusses Jam v. International Finance Corporation, in which the court held that international organizations can be sued in U.S. courts for their commercial activities; she suggests that “assuring appropriate recourse for individuals who are harmed by international organizations remains a genuine problem[, and that] Jam didn’t get us to a solution, and may not even have brought us closer.”
• At Law & Liberty, Mark Pulliam maintains that last term’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, in which the court held that an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment, “signaled that its decades-old love affair with the NLRA—a New Deal-era statute that codified class struggle—is finally over.”

• At Medium, Ned Foley looks at this term’s partisan-gerrymandering cases, Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, concluding that the court “should embrace Article I as a basis for judicial review of congressional gerrymanders pursuant to the exercise of its interpretative authority under Marbury v. Madison, while simultaneously eschewing the First Amendment and Equal Protection as grounds for this review.”
• At The Atlantic, Scott Bullock and Nick Sibilla argue that even after the court’s unanimous ruling in Timbs v. Indiana that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines applies to states and localities, “further strengthening the excessive-fines clause is crucial to restraining the grasping hand of the government—because predatory policing remains widespread, part of a broader trend toward monetizing the U.S. criminal-justice system, with an increasing number of cities and private firms viewing fines and fees as a revenue source.”

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