Monday round-up

For the Washington Examiner, Melissa Quinn reports that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court will start its next term after a summer punctuated by mass shootings that left more than two dozen dead, heightening the impact of pending cases that focus on when civilians can carry weapons in public.” Robert Barnes reports for The Washington Post that the court “must decide whether to press ahead with a Second Amendment case it has accepted for the coming term, its first in a decade,” after “the city and state of New York … have essentially surrendered, changing the restrictions at issue even though the city successfully defended them before a district judge and a federal appeals court.”

Briefly:

• At CNN, Catherine Valentine reports that “[t]he Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to review and reverse what it describes firmly as a ‘misunderstanding of the law’” in a lower-court ruling “that a five-year statute of limitations [on rape charges against members of the military] existed before 2006.”

• At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie looks at three cases the court will hear this fall that ask whether federal law protects employees from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, noting that although “[e]xpanding gay rights via an old statute might seem like a stretch for a Supreme Court with a five-justice conservative majority that now lacks Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored four landmark opinions vindicating the rights of gay and lesbian people,” “the most promising arguments running through four dozen briefs from the plaintiffs and their supporters do not try to push the justices toward any particularly radical ideas.”
• In The New York Review of Books, David Cole reviews two books about the Supreme Court – “a carefully argued and disturbing portrait of how partisan politics threaten to engulf the Court” by Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum, and Joan Biskupic’s biography of Chief Justice John Roberts, “at once a committed Republican with very conservative policy preferences and ties to the conservative community, and an institutionalist who cares deeply about the nonpartisan character of the Court.”

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