Thursday round-up

On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts released his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage. At Fox News, Bill Mears reports that, “’[s]aying ‘public confidence in the judiciary’ was at stake,” Roberts “urged Americans to become more engaged in learning about the role of courts in promoting democracy.” Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that the chief justice “decr[ied] the corrosive effect ‘rumor and false information,’ spread instantly by social media, can inflict on democracy.” Additional coverage comes from Mark Walsh at Education Week’s School Law Blog, who reports that “[w]ith Roberts preparing to preside over the impending impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the U.S. Senate, the 2019 report includes a few passing references to justice and the importance of an independent judiciary.”

Briefly:

• At The Hill, John Kruzel and Harper Neidig report that “[t]he Supreme Court will hear a slate of highly charged disputes when the justices return to the bench in the new year and resume one of the most politically volatile terms in recent memory.”
• At The World and Everything in It, Mary Reichard discusses the oral arguments in ERISA case Retirement Plans Committee of IBM v. Jander, Rodriguez v. FDIC, which asks how courts should determine ownership of a tax refund paid to an affiliated corporate group, and Monasky v. Taglieri, which involves the “habitual residence” provision of an international child-abduction convention.
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse warns that Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam “will test the current justices’ adherence to an important constitutional principle that emerged from the struggle among the three branches of government over what legal regime should govern the detention of those deemed enemy combatants in the aftermath of 9/11.”

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