Thursday round-up

At Bloomberg Law, Jordan Rubin reports that “Michael R. Dreeben, the federal government’s top criminal lawyer who argued a staggering 100-plus cases at the U.S. Supreme Court and also worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, is leaving his post, according to the Justice Department.” Tony Mauro reports for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required) that “Dreeben made his 100th argument at the Supreme Court in 2016, earning praise from three justices at an event marking the occasion.”

Briefly:

• At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Mike Scarcella reports on an upcoming “petition at the U.S. Supreme Court that will urge the justices to confront the high-profile murder conviction of the Maryland man who was at the center of the podcast “Serial.’”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman observes that “with 55 cases already decided, we have unique and surprising patterns of decision-making among the justices,” most notably in “the Court’s 5-4 (or 5-3) decisions, where one vote could shift a decision in a different direction.”
• In the latest episode of SCOTUStalk (podcast), Amy Howe recaps Monday’s opinions and orders.
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse writes that the court has recently demonstrated “an institutional instinct for self-preservation” by declining to address controversial issues involving conflicts between religious liberty and anti-discrimination laws, as well as abortion, leading “to a final question: What to do about the census case?”; she suggests that the court could adopt an option “suggested by the plaintiffs in a final footnote to their latest brief: Just dismiss the appeal.”
• At Bloomberg Law, David Holmberg urges the justices to review “cases involving the ACA’s “Risk Corridor Program,” which encouraged “health insurance companies to issue affordable and comprehensive coverage to millions of previously uninsured Americans” by reimbursing the companies for some of their losses, arguing that a lower-court decision against the companies who were seeking reimbursement “threatens to destroy the very foundation of trust upon which all private-public partnerships—critical to a well-functioning U.S. economy—necessarily are based.”
• At Stafford Rosenbaum, Jeffrey Mandell looks at the potential effect on Monday’s decision in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, in which the court held that Virginia legislators lack the legal right to appeal a lower-court ruling that requires 11 state legislative districts to be redrawn to correct racial gerrymandering, in Wisconsin, “where our Legislature has recently increased its legal authority to intervene in litigation”; he observes that “the new intervention laws might not give the Wisconsin Legislature as much leverage in federal-court litigation as might have been imagined.”
• At Law360 (subscription required), Andrew Stakelum looks at CITGO Asphalt Refining Co. v. Frascati Shipping Co., Ltd., which asks whether, under federal maritime law, a safe-berth clause in a voyage-charter contract is a guarantee of a ship’s safety or imposes a duty of due diligence. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondents in this case.]
• At the Nixon Foundation blog, Jeffrey Morris notes that next week marks the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s appointment of Chief Justice Warren Burger, and he assesses Burger’s legacy.

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