Thursday round-up

At the NCSL Blog, Lisa Soronen looks at Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, in which the court ruled unanimously that a plaintiff who sues for racial discrimination in contracting under federal law has to plead and prove that race was a but-for cause of his injury. At Vox, Ian Millhiser writes that the “consensus in Comcast signals that the liberal justices may have shifted into triage mode, accepting that some incursions on civil rights are no longer worth resisting in a Court that’s lurched hard to the right.”

Briefly:

• At Subscript Law, Mariam Morshedi has a graphic explainer for the court’s decision in Kahler v. Kansas, in which the justices ruled that the due process clause does not require Kansas to adopt an insanity test that turns on a defendant’s ability to recognize that his crime was morally wrong.
• At Forbes, Andrew Wimer urges the court to review Salgado v. United States, and to establish “a clear standard for when attorneys’ fees are due” in civil forfeiture cases.
• At Crime & Consequences, Kent Scheidegger looks at Monday’s cert denial in Avery v. United States, which involves whether the ban on second or successive filings of habeas petitions applies to federal prisoners seeking collateral review, suggesting that “the Court should take this up” in a different case, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated his willingness to do.
• At the NCSL Blog, Lisa Soronen discusses Allen v. Cooper, in which the court held on Monday that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to revoke the states’ immunity from suit for copyright infringement in a 1990 law, concluding that the decision “is significant for states in the big picture because the court held the line on its sovereign immunity precedent,” but “as a practical matter, the impact of this case is probably limited.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse explains why Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, in which the court will consider the scope of the “ministerial exception,” a court-created doctrine that prohibits courts from reviewing employment decisions by religious employers involving their ministers, “will have a great deal to tell us about the court’s receptivity to the increasingly audacious claims of religious supremacy now hurtling its way.”

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