Thursday round-up

Briefly:

• At ABA Journal, Mark Walsh previews contentious cases set for the upcoming Supreme Court term on Title VII, DACA, and the Second Amendment, cases that “most legal observers agree that the justices worked hard to block or push down the road … from last term’s docket.”
• At The Economist, Steven Mazie analyzes how the federal government’s recent emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to “lift a district-court injunction against” a new asylum rule barring those who could have sought refuge in another country, fits into the a string of recent efforts by the administration to jump the queue at the court.
• At the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse observes that the Trump administration’s amicus briefs filed in the upcoming Title VII cases, when measured against its housing policy in light of a 2015 Supreme Court case, illustrates a conflict between its two simultaneous goals: “trying to undo longstanding civil rights protections and blocking new ones.”
• At The Hill, Allen Dickerson and Zachary Morgan argue that a new petition offers a chance for the Supreme Court to overturn a campaign finance law in Alaska, “by far the largest state in the country in size,” which “imposes the lowest limit on donations to statewide candidates.”
• At the National Law Journal (registration or subscription required), Mike Scarcella and Marcia Coyle examine a Boise, Idaho, petition to the Supreme Court that provides “the latest—and rare—peek inside the billing arrangements and rates of some of the country’s biggest firms and their appellate leaders.”
• At Verdict, Sherry Colb delves into last term’s decision in Nieves v. Bartlett and the potential problems with its consent to “pretextual, speech-based arrests,” focusing on how these “differ from other pretextual arrests” and on similarities between the Nieves ruling and case law regarding “post-conviction incarceration.”
• At Washington Independent Review of Books, Kenneth Jost reviews t new books regarding shifts in the Supreme Court nomination process, “Confirmation Bias” by Carl Hulse and “Justice on Trial” by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, remarking that despite dramatic differences all three authors “end in a kind of agreement that the judicial confirmation process is badly broken but cite different evidence thereof.”

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