Friday round-up

Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, that yesterday “the justices responded again to the emergency created by the [coronavirus] and its impact on U.S. workplaces by issuing an order that … relaxes filing deadlines for petitions seeking Supreme Court review.” At Bloomberg Law, Jordan Rubin reports that “Thursday’s order, which doesn’t apply to appeals that have already been granted certiorari, also relaxes court practices on certain time extension requests.”

At the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh takes a look back at “the past outbreaks of disease cited by the court” in its recent announcement that it is postponing the March oral argument session. At CNN, Joan Biskupic observes that the coronavirus pandemic “is bound to force Supreme Court justices into new territory[:] They may open their operations in more modern ways[, o]r, if they move in the opposite direction and shun any high-tech alternative, they might postpone all previously scheduled March and April oral argument sessions, a total 20 disputes, until next summer or fall.” Tom Goldstein offers some possibilities for how the court could handle the term’s yet-to-be-argued cases in a post on this blog.

Briefly:

• At Roll Call, Todd Ruger reports that the court’s closure to the public and postponement of the March oral arguments “doesn’t mean the justices have to stop working or releasing opinions”; he highlights “a few of the decisions for which the country has been waiting the longest from the court … that could play into this year’s presidential election.”
• Joel Ebert reports at the Nashville Tennessean (via How Appealing) that “[a]ttorneys representing Tennessee are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on their lawsuit against the federal government’s refugee resettlement policy.”
• At The World and Everything in It, Mary Reichard breaks down the oral arguments in three cases from the February sitting: United States v. Sineneng-Smith, a First Amendment challenge to a federal law making it a crime to encourage or induce illegal immigration for financial gain, Liu v. Securities and Exchange Commission, which asks whether the SEC can seek disgorgement of profits as a judicial remedy for violating the securities-fraud laws, and Opati v. Sudan, about the availability of punitive damages under the terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

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