Friday round-up

Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, that after announcing in the wake of the courts decision in Department of Commerce v. New York that it was printing the 2020 census forms without a citizenship question, the government told a federal judge in a related case that it is now exploring ‘a path forward to including the question on the census. For The Washington Post, Tara Bahrampour and others report that the judge has given the Trump administration until 2 p.m. Friday to explain how it intends to proceed. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse probe[s] the census decision itself, suggesting that the opinions that provide the holding the chief justices plus the partially concurring opinion of Justice Stephen Breyer for the courts four liberals have all the hallmarks of judicial tectonic plates that shifted late in the day to produce an outcome that none of the players anticipated at the start.

At The Economist, Steven Mazie reviews the recent Supreme Court term, noting that [t]he conservative justices took turns joining the liberal justices in nine 5-4 victoriesand they chalked up only half as many wins in closely divided cases as they did a year ago. For the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh writes that the justices repeatedly knocked heads over the role of stare decisis, which is viewed by some observers as a proxy for the great battle expected to come over abortion rights and whether the courts key precedents in that area will be overruled. In the inaugural episode of Strict Scrutiny (podcast), hosts Leah Litman, Melissa Murray, Jaime Santos and Kate Shaw recap two of this term’s biggest opinions–partisan gerrymandering and the census — and walk through a theme of this term (stare decisis) before talking about the podcast’s role in Supreme Court legal culture.

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