Wednesday round-up

Briefly:

• Nina Totenberg reports at NPR, that in a wide-ranging interview, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that “she does not favor proposals put forth by some Democratic presidential candidates who have advocated changing the number of Supreme Court justices if the Democrats win the presidency” because “’[i]f anything would make the court look partisan,’ she said, ‘it would be that.’”
• For The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin reports that as “[t]he Supreme Court’s conservative majority, reinforced by last year’s appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has expressed increasing frustration with procedural tactics inmates employ to delay their executions, as well as abolitionist campaigns that led drugmakers to restrict the use of their products to end an inmate’s life,” a new government report shows that “[d]eath row’s population declined for the 17th straight year in 2017, while the duration from sentence to execution increased to 20 years, three months.”
• At Balkinization, Richard Primus takes issue with Justice Neil Gorsuch’s “choice to use [John] Locke as a guide to the Framers’ ideas about the separation of powers” in Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy v. United States, “which fires a loud shot across the bow of the administrative state.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the justices’ citations to briefs and law-review articles during October Term 2018.

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