Two oral arguments are on the justices’ agenda this morning. First up is United States v. Davis, which asks whether the definition of “crime of violence” is unconstitutionally vague in the context of federal criminal prosecutions involving firearms. Leah Litman previewed the case for this blog. Isaac Syed has a preview at Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. Today’s second argument is in McDonough v. Smith, in which the court will decide when the statute of limitations begins to run for federal civil rights claims based on fabrication of evidence in criminal proceedings. This blog’s preview came from Howard Wasserman; Isaac Syed previews the case for Cornell.
Megan Carpenter has this blog’s analysis of Monday’s oral argument in Iancu v. Brunetti, in which the court considered a First Amendment challenge to the federal prohibition on “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks by a designer who wanted to register the trademark for his FUCT clothing brand. At Law360 (subscription required), Bill Donahue reports that during the argument, “the justices avoided using dirty words but voiced concern about the ‘erratic’ way the rule has been enforced.” At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie writes that the case “may be a close call”: “The justices tend to be protective of free speech, but the prospect of patent-office officials forced to approve vulgar or racist trademarks makes them queasy.”
This blog’s analysis of Monday’s argument in Emulex Corp. v. Varjabedian, which asks whether securities investors can sue a company for failing to provide adequate information for the investors to use in evaluating the price of a tender offer, comes from Ronald Mann. For Reuters’ On the Case blog, Alison Frankel hazards a prediction “that the court’s conservative majority concludes shareholders don’t have a private right of action, over a dissent from liberal justices who argue the court should not have reached the question.”
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