Wednesday round-up

For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “[a]s his Supreme Court prepares for a contentious term featuring cases on immigration, gay and lesbian rights, gun ownership and, in all likelihood, abortion, [Chief Justice John] Roberts can look forward to opposition from the left and distrust from the right.” Adam Liptak reports for The New York Times that in public remarks last night, Roberts “forcefully rejected criticism that the Supreme Court’s work had been warped by partisanship.” Additional coverage of the chief justice’s remarks comes from Ariane de Vogue at CNN.

Briefly:

• At Bloomberg Law, Kimberly Robinson reports that the “Los Angeles Rams want the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in its dispute with St. Louis over the team’s 2016 relocation back to the City of Angels,” asking “the justices to halt a state court ruling requiring the franchise to litigate the dispute in the courts, rather than through arbitration.”
• For Newsweek, Roger Parloff explains that three cases that ask whether federal law protects employees from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender identity “are about to test whether conservative Supreme Court justices are seen to rule according to their professed legal principles—or their politics.”
• At the Heritage Foundation, Elizabeth Slattery offers an overview of the upcoming Supreme Court term, noting that “[f]or a term leading into a presidential election year, the justices are not shying away from headline-making cases that will place the Supreme Court squarely in the minds of Americans on Election Day 2020.”
• A white paper by Johanna Kalb and Alicia Bannon at the Brennan Center for Justice “provides a brief overview of the current judicial ethics framework [within which the Supreme Court operates] and highlights three changes that the Court could adopt right now to bring clarity and transparency to the ethical standards governing the nation’s most powerful jurists.”
• In an op-ed for The Washington Times, Kelly Shackelford bemoans recent “effort[s] to weaken the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court itself.”
• At Take Care, Michele Goodwin weighs in on June Medical Services v. Gee, which asks whether a decision upholding Louisiana’s law requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital conflicts with recent Supreme Court precedent, arguing that, “as with the other antiabortion measures making their way through the courts is that these targeted regulations of abortion providers (TRAP laws) have nothing to do with protecting women or their health.”
• At The New York Times (via How Appealing), Jennifer Szalai reviews “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas,” in which “Corey Robin presents a case that also happens to be a high-wire act — that the Supreme Court justice who almost never speaks from the bench, who writes controversial opinions paying little heed to legal precedent, is in fact quite explicable.”

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