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Thursday round-up

Amy Howe analyzes yesterday’s argument in Monasky v. Taglieri, which involves the application to an infant of the “habitual residence” provision of an international child-abduction convention, for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. At Bloomberg Law, Heather Saltz reports that the justices “struggled during oral argument with the standard for deciding under the Hague Convention what country should be able to determine where an infant in the middle of a custody battle should reside.”

For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that during yesterday’s second argument, in McKinney v. Arizona, the court “struggled to decide what kind of new sentencing an Arizona death row inmate was entitled to after a federal appeals court ruled that the trial judge who had condemned him to death failed to take account of evidence of abuse the inmate had endured as a child.” Richard Wolf reports for USA Today that “[a]fter an hour’s debate in court, it appeared possible the justices could rule McKinney deserves a new trial court sentencing to assess mitigating factors such as his childhood abuse, but not before a jury.” At Crime & Consequences, Kent Scheidegger argues that “an essential issue in the case was barely mentioned” during the argument.

Yesterday the justices ruled unanimously in Peter v. NantKwest that the Patent and Trademark Office cannot recover the salaries of its legal personnel in a district-court proceeding contesting the denial of a patent. Ronald Mann analyzes the opinion for this blog. This blog’s analysis of Tuesday’s opinion – the first of the term — in Rotkiske v. Klemm, in which the justices ruled that the one-year statute of limitations in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act generally begins to run when the alleged violation occurs, not when it is discovered, comes from Danielle D’Onfro.

Briefly:

  • At ReligiousLiberty.TV, Michael Peabody notes that “[t]he Solicitor General … has recommended that the United States Supreme Court agree to consider [Patterson v. Walgreen Co.,] a Sabbath accommodation case involving a Seventh-day Adventist.”
  • This blog’s analysis of Tuesday’s argument in Holguin-Hernandez v. United States, in which the court will decide whether a criminal defendant must formally object to his sentence to preserve an objection to the length of the sentence on appeal, comes from Rory Little.
  • At Newsmax, Travis Korson warns that if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Google” in Google v. Oracle America, a dispute over the copyright status of application programming interfaces, “[t]he safeguards protecting digital information could be dismantled, threatening to undermine the very provisions that made America so economically strong.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
  • At Stanford Law School’s CIS blog, Stephen Wm. Smith weighs in on the pending cert petition in Ackles v. United States, arguing that the lower court erred by engaging in “an unduly expansive reading of the Stored Communications Act to authorize real time cell phone tracking.”
  • In the latest episode of Strict Scrutiny (podcast), Jaime Santos, Kate Shaw and Melissa Murray “break down the DACA argument and speak with Luis Cortes, who worked on the DACA case and is a DACA recipient himself.”

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!

Recommended Citation: Edith Roberts, Thursday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Dec. 12, 2019, 6:54 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/12/thursday-round-up-504/