Tuesday round-up

Briefly:

• Emma Platoff reports at The Texas Tribune (via How Appealing) that “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to strike down a 2016 California law that bans state-funded travel to states with discriminatory laws — a list Texas landed on nearly three years ago after the Legislature approved a religious-refusal law for adoptions in the state.”
• According to Ariane de Vogue at CNN, “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a long-time supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, suggested Monday night that the deadline to ratify the measure as a constitutional amendment has expired and that the decades long effort must start anew.”
• Ellen Gilmer at Bloomberg Environment takes a close look at U,S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association, a “high-stakes battle over the $7.8 billion Atlantic Coast pipeline” that “spotlights a persistent challenge that transcends political winds: how to build America’s infrastructure without ripping up America.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in this case.]

• In a column for The New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that although Chief Justice John Roberts “must be relieved” to return to his day job now that the impeachment trial is over, “Mr. Trump’s policies and personal affairs will continue to occupy the chief justice and his court.”
• At The World and Everything in It (podcast), Mary Reichard discusses the oral arguments in trademark cases Lucky Brand Dungarees v. Marcel Fashions Group and Romag Fasteners v. Fossil, Inc.
• At Reason, Damon Root observes that “[b]y following [a venerable precedent] without going one step beyond it” in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a constitutional challenge to the structure of the CFPB, “the Supreme Court could still spell constitutional doom” for the agency.
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman assesses trends this term in amicus filings, pace and timing of cert grants, and length of time between petition grant and oral argument.
• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy (via How Appealing), Orin Kerr considers an underlying question raised by Torres v. Madrid, which asks whether an unsuccessful attempt to detain a suspect by physical force is a “seizure” under the Fourth Amendment: “To what extent should the Court defer to common law rules in interpreting the Fourth Amendment when the context in which the rules were announced is very different from today?”

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