Tuesday round-up

Yesterday evening the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld a subpoena for Trump’s financial records. This blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court, comes from Amy Howe. Adam Liptak reports for The New York Times that “[t]he court’s stay was in one sense routine, maintaining the status quo while the court decides whether to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal in the case[, b]ut it also suggested, given that it takes five votes to grant a stay, that the court viewed the legal questions presented by the case as substantial enough to warrant further consideration.” At CNN, Ariane de Vogue reports that “[t]he justices set up an expedited briefing schedule to hear arguments from both sides on whether the court should agree to hear Trump’s appeal this term.”

Yesterday morning the justices released additional orders from last week’s conference; they did not add any new cases to their docket for the term, and they denied review in several high-profile cases. Amy Howe covers the order list for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. At Bloomberg Environment, Ellen Gilmer reports that the justices declined to “step into a legal dispute between a prominent climate scientist and a pair of conservative organizations that questioned his work and compared him to a convicted child molester.” For The New York Times, Karen Zraick reports that the justices also turned away “the case of Adnan Syed, whose murder conviction nearly 20 years ago formed the basis of the hit podcast “’Serial.’”

Jonathan Adler writes at Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog (via How Appealing) that the justices denied rehearing in “Gundy v. United States, a failed non-delegation challenge to portions of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act”[;] Unsurprisingly, the Court also denied certiorari in a parallel non-delegation case, … but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately suggesting he is ready to reconsider the Court’s nondelegation precedents, particularly in the context of ‘major questions.’” Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that the court “re-entered the national debate over the influence of money in politics Monday by vacating a lower court decision that upheld Alaska’s low campaign contribution limits.” At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen observes that “there are better and worse ways for campaign finance reformers to lose at the current Supreme Court, … [a]nd the way the state of Alaska lost [yester]day is the least bad way it could lose.” At Crime & Consequences, Kent Scheidegger offers his take on the output from Friday’s conference.

Briefly:

• At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley reports that “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was present for work on Monday, a day after being released from a hospital following her admission on Friday with chills and a fever, a spokeswoman said.”
• Kimberly Robinson reports at Bloomberg Law that “[t]he Trump administration’s focus on immigration has crowded the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket with an unusually large number of those cases this term”: “[T]he justices will have to sort out immigration cases touching on issues from expedited removal to identity fraud to judicial review.”
• In The World and Everything In It (podcast), Mary Reichard discusses the oral arguments in Hernandez v. Mesa, which arises from a Mexican family’s efforts to hold a U.S. Border Patrol agent liable for the shooting death of their son, who was on the Mexican side of the border, and immigration case Barton v. Barr.
• At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re writes that in Kansas v. Glover, which asks whether, for the purposes of an investigative stop under the Fourth Amendment, it is reasonable for police office to suspect that the registered owner of a car is the driver, “the justices and their commentators have focused on whether police had a reliable or testable basis for their suspicion; but a lack of individualized evidence may actually be the more serious and intractable problem.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondent in this case.]
• At The American Prospect (via How Appealing), Andrew Koppelman notes that “[i]t’s now more than a month since the Supreme Court heard oral argument … on whether federal law prohibits anti-gay discrimination, and suddenly conservatives have focused their attacks on what might seem like an improbable target: Justice Elena Kagan’s insistence on the importance of the plain language of the law.”
• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog (via How Appealing), Josh Blackman “offer[s] several suggestions to improve the Supreme Court bar line.”

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