Friday round-up

Briefly:

• For The Economist, Steven Mazie reports that a “bundle of hot-button controversies await the nine” justices “when the Supreme Court returns to work on October 7^th,” following “four tumultuous years that saw one death, a retirement, three pitched Senate confirmation battles, two new arrivals and, for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—86 and the anchor of the court’s liberal wing—two cancer diagnoses.”
• For The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that “[t]he organizations challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to end protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children have picked Theodore B. Olson, a Republican former solicitor general and lawyer long associated with conservative causes, to argue their case before the Supreme Court.”
• Pamela King reports at E&E News that “[i]n the coming weeks, the high court will announce whether it will review a decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the Forest Service did not have the power to authorize the 600-mile [Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline] project to cross the Appalachian Trail.”
• In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, John Bursch writes that “[t]he central question” of G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “is whether unelected government officials can redefine ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity’ in a law that Congress wrote,” arguing that “[i]f they can, that has negative consequences for everyone who should be able to rely on what the law says.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of respondent Stephens in this case.]
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Jay Schweikert urges the court to hear Asaro v. United States and “clarify that acquitted conduct sentencing is unjust and unconstitutional.”

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