Breaking News

Friday round-up

Yesterday the Supreme Court released the justices’ financial disclosure forms for 2018. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “[t]he annual listing of investments, liabilities and potential conflicts of interest showed nothing unusual for the nine members of the nation’s highest court, who earn $255,300 (slightly higher for the chief justice).” Fix the Court notes that the “justices took 64 trips last year for which they received third-party reimbursements,” and that “it is assumed that the reimbursements for these jaunts was each greater than $390, the statutory reporting trigger, but that’s all the public knows, since the justices are permitted to omit reimbursement amounts from their reports.”

Briefly:

  • Amy Howe covers a recent request by the challengers in the dispute over the decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, who have “asked the justices to postpone their ruling in the wake of new evidence in the case,” for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court.
  • At Take Care, Brianne Gorod notes that the Constitution designates the chief justice to preside over a presidential impeachment trial, observing that “[g]iven the prominent role … Chief Justice [John Roberts] would play in such a process, it is critical that the public view Roberts as an impartial figure, beholden neither to the President nor to those who are trying to remove the President from office.”
  • At Second Thoughts, Jacob Charles suggests that this week’s decision in Parker Drilling Management Services. Ltd. v. Newton, in which the justices ruled that state law is not adopted as surrogate federal law on the outer continental shelf unless federal law leaves a gap for state law to fill, “may contain clues about how the Court could approach the interpretive question involved in the Sandy Hook litigation over the Protection for Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.”
  • At the Council of State Governments’ Knowledge Center blog, Lisa Soronen looks at Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, in which the court will decide whether claims under Section 1981, which prohibits racial discrimination in contracting, require but-for causation, or whether it is enough that race was a motivating factor in the defendant’s decision.
  • A Scholars Strategy Network podcast focuses on this term’s partisan-gerrymandering cases, “what these decisions might mean for future elections, and what else can be done to get states to draw maps in ways that are not politically motivated.”
  • In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, “Jason Snead joins Elizabeth Slattery to slog through recent snooze-worthy opinions.”

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, Friday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 14, 2019, 6:45 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/06/friday-round-up-475/