Friday round-up

Reactions to the death this week of retired Justice John Paul Stevens continue. For the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh reports that “[i]n the wake of Stevens’ death, admirers spoke of him as the last of a breed of nominees chosen based more on his legal acumen than on political calculations of how he might rule or whether he would please particular camps.” At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps writes of the influence on a young Stevens of “the arrest of his father … on charges that he and two other family members had embezzled funds to cover losses at their downtown-Chicago hotel”; Epps finds it “impossible to read [Stevens’] opinions without concluding that he had also learned some judicial empathy for those trapped in the system’s coils.” Andrew Cohen writes at the Brennan Center for Justice that, to Stevens’ “everlasting credit, his ability to recognize his errors and seek to rectify them became one of his many strengths.”

Briefly:

• In a bonus episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, “Carrie Severino and Mollie Hemingway join Elizabeth Slattery to talk about their new book, ‘Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.’”
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Roger Schechter remarks that it is “curious … how little attention any of the Justices paid to the unique features of trademark law” in Iancu v. Brunetti, in which the court held that a federal ban on the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks violates the First Amendment.
• At TPM Café, David Gans explains that “[n]ow that the citizenship question is dead” after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Department of Commerce v. New York, “the next big fight will be whether states can draw legislative lines based only on the citizen voting age population.”

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!