Friday round-up

Yesterday the Supreme Court announced that the court building would be closed to the public until further notice, but would remain “open for official business.” Amy Howe covers the announcement for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. Also at this blog, Katie Bart and Kalvis Golde put the announcement in historical perspective. Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) that the court “is next scheduled to hear oral arguments on March 23, beginning a two-week sitting that will include several significant cases, including legal actions filed by President Trump to prevent Deutsche Bank AG and the Mazars accounting firm from turning over his financial records under subpoenas from House committees and a New York state grand jury.” At Vox, Ian Millhiser notes that “[i]t is unclear … whether the Court will still hold oral arguments” in the March session and “whether the Court will allow members of the Supreme Court bar or members of the press to hear arguments if they do take place as scheduled.”

Briefly:

• At Quartz, Ephrat Livni looks at U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com, a case to be argued later this month that asks whether the addition of “.com” to a generic term creates a protectable trademark.
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Cori Alonso-Yoder explains that Kansas v. Garcia, in which the court held that federal immigration law does not preempt a state prosecution for identity theft for using someone else’s Social Security number to obtain employment, “in supporting prosecution of workers[,] fits within a larger trend shifting the inquiry away from unauthorized employment and toward unauthorized workers.”
• At The Atlantic (via How Appealing), Adav Noti writes that “[t]his summer,” in Chiafalo v. Washington, a constitutional challenge to a “faithless elector” law that threatens to fine electors who vote contrary to how state law directs, “the Supreme Court will decide whether to completely reshape how the American public elects the president of the United States, and the 2020 election—one of enormous consequence—will be the test run for the new rules.”
• At Dorf on Law, Sherri Colb announces the launch of Oral Argument 2.0, a new website that “invites law professors and attorneys to play the role of an oral argument amicus” by reviewing oral arguments, identifying “questions that appear central to one or more of the Justices” and crafting answers, “with an eye to scripting an oral statement rather than to writing part of a brief.”
• At CNS News, Denise Harle weighs in on in June Medical Services v. Russo, a challenge to a Louisiana law regulating abortion in which the state contends that abortion providers do not have a legal right to sue on behalf of their patients, arguing that “women can speak for themselves—and can speak for themselves best.”
• Commentary on the Supreme Court’s order reviving the government’s “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers comes from Scott Cosenza at Liberty Nation.
• In an op-ed for The New York Post, Josh Hammer maintains that in Google v. Oracle America, a dispute over the copyright status of application programming interfaces, “Google is offering a dangerous legal argument that, if left standing, would directly abet China’s ­relentless theft of American intellectual property.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
• In the last episode of The Ginsburg Tapes, Lauren Moxley analyzes Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s final argument in the Supreme Court as an advocate in November 1978, in Duren v. Missouri, in which Ginsburg represented a criminal defendant challenging a Missouri law that only required men to serve on juries.

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