Thursday round-up
At Bloomberg Law (subscription or registration required), Mark Gurman reports that “Apple Inc. executives Tim Cook and Deirdre O’Brien waded into the battle over Dreamers, filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.” At Axios, Mike Allen and others report that “[t]he brief is a passionate defense of the Dreamers, or those protected from deportation by an order established during the Obama administration, which the Trump administration wants to end.” Rafael Bernal reports at The Hill that “[a]n alliance of immigrant rights organizations on Wednesday launched a national campaign to showcase the benefits of the … program ahead of a Nov. 12 Supreme Court hearing on its termination.”
At Public Discourse, Ryan Anderson argues that in three upcoming cases about whether federal law protects employees from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, “[m]uch of what the activists claim is ‘discrimination’ is simply disagreement about human sexuality, where acting based on true beliefs about human sexuality is re-described as discriminatory.” At Lambda Legal, Jennifer Pizer and Karen Loewy maintain that “[i]f the Court reads Title VII logically and confirms it protects LGBTQ workers, it will confirm resoundingly that anti-LGBTQ bias is wrong,” a “statement [that] would be hugely influential.” Additional commentary comes from John Bursch at the Acton Institute and Ian Millhiser at Vox (via How Appealing).
Briefly:
- At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that “[e]ven as the legal profession pledges to bolster diversity in its workforce, the number of female lawyers who argue before the U.S. Supreme Court is still bafflingly low.”
- For The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Jess Bravin describes some of the “15,000 handwritten documents that Timothy Johnson, a political-science professor at the University of Minnesota, has copied over two decades from archives housing the papers of former justices,” including notes passed among the justices while on the bench, that will be part of a new online database.
- At Bloomberg Environment, Ellen Gilmer reports that “[t]he Supreme Court’s environmental docket is still in flux just days from the launch of its new term, which begins Oct. 7[:] One of two high-stakes pollution cases on the calendar might not happen at all, and the court hasn’t yet decided whether to add more,” and “[d]ebates over natural gas pipelines, climate change, and the Flint water crisis are vying for the justices’ attention.”
- At Bloomberg Law (via How Appealing), Kimberly Robinson looks at “a number of ‘sleeper cases’ on the docket this term that could be deeply significant for the way lawyers practice—from pleading standards to preclusion rules to the availability of statutory resources.”
- In an op-ed for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Brian Wolfman urges the court to review “[a]n important race discrimination case, Peterson v. Linear Controls, … and strike a blow for workplace equality, correcting a longstanding injustice permeating the lower courts”; he notes that in “Peterson, the Fifth Circuit accepted alleged facts as true—that is, that the employer intentionally segregated its workforce, subjecting only black workers to oppressive conditions—and then held that Title VII has nothing to say about it.”
- At Crime & Consequences, Kent Scheidegger has compiled the 20 amicus briefs urging the court to review City of Boise, Idaho v. Martin, a “fight over Boise’s anti-camping ordinance as applied to homeless persons,” into a single document.
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