Friday round-up

Briefly:

• At AP, Mark Sherman reports that “[b]oth sides of the abortion debate are waiting to see if the Supreme Court adds new disputes over state abortion regulations to its election-year docket[:] The court is expected [today] to announce new cases it will consider in the term that begins next week.”
• For The Washington Post (subscription required), Robert Barnes looks at the “blockbuster question” the Supreme Court will consider “at the start of its new term: Is it legal to fire someone for being gay or transgender?”
• At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley reports that “[t]he U.S. Supreme Court’s new term opens on Monday with the conservative majority in a position to take a more aggressive rightward turn on divisive issues including abortion, gay rights and gun control while also refereeing legal brawls involving President Donald Trump.”
• Dan Berman and Ariane de Vogue report at CNN that “[l]awyers standing before the Supreme Courtnow will have at least two minutes to talk before justices rip their arguments apart,” according to new guidelines released by the court yesterday.

• At Bloomberg Law, Jordan Rubin reports that the new term’s “criminal docket has a little something for everyone—the insanity defense, the D.C. sniper, the death penalty, the Fourth Amendment, and the New Jersey corruption saga known as ‘Bridgegate.’”
• At Law360 (subscription required), Harry Sandick and Jacob Newman “look at a few of the cases in the upcoming Supreme Court term … that may have a notable impact on white collar criminal defense practice.”
• For this blog, Kalvis Golde reports that in remarks at the dedication of a new college chapel yesterday, Justice Clarence Thomas  focused “on the importance of faith in both his own life and higher education in general.”
• At Second Thoughts, Jake Charles suggests that Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion last term in Kisor v. Wilkie may shed light on whether lower courts are “bound to an originalist methodology in assessing Second Amendment claims.”
• Prosecutorial Accountability questions “some claims made by Oregon and Louisiana” in Ramos v. Louisiana, in which the justices will decide whether the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a unanimous jury applies to the states.
• In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS101 podcast, “Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates preview oral arguments coming up next week and discuss a trio of cases involving state abortion regulations that the justices may take up soon.”  

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!