Friday round-up

Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal that a “judicial-conduct panel on Thursday dismissed ethics complaints filed against Justice Brett Kavanaugh over his behavior at confirmation hearings, concluding that members of the Supreme Court were exempt from review.” At Bloomberg Law, Kimberly Robinson reports that “[t]he order … could be the end of the misconduct controversy as the decision upheld the conclusion of a special panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.” Additional coverage comes from Jacqueline Thomsen at The Hill and Zoe Tillman at BuzzFeed News.

Briefly:

• At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie looks at a new First Amendment challenge to Michigan’s plan to establish an independent redistricting commission; Mazie notes that the Supreme Court cited the Michigan effort approvingly in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that partisan-gerrymandering challenges to electoral maps are political questions that are not reviewable in federal court, and he wonders whether “Chief Justice Roberts and the four conservative justices who signed his opinion [would] turn around after Rucho and strike down a commission they specifically pointed to as a viable way to address warped electoral lines.”
• At Final Decisions, Bryan Lammon notes that a “second cert petition has been filed in Xitronix and KLA-Tencor’s fight—as well as the Fifth and Federal Circuit’s fight—over the Federal Circuit’s exclusive jurisdiction in patent appeals.”
• At The Progressive, Bill Blum observes that the “Supreme Court’s 2018-19 term made it clearer than ever that Chief Justice John Roberts rules the roost behind the high tribunal’s regal red curtains,” and that, although “[h]e may be more cautious and less dogmatic than some of his brethren,” “Roberts is no liberal.”
• The hosts of Words Matter (podcast) “sit down with Lauren Moxley, the host of The Ginsburg Tapes Podcast — which chronicles Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s oral arguments before the then all-male United States Supreme Court from 1972 to 1978 —before she became #Notorious RBG.”

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