Friday round-up

In an op-ed for The Washington Post (subscription required), Laurene Powell Jobs worries that “if the Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to terminate DACA” in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, “roughly 29,000 … DACA recipients who are health-care practitioners face the risk of termination and deportation just as a shortage of medical personnel is stretching hospital systems already overburdened by coronavirus.” Other looks at DACA recipients on the front lines of the pandemic come from Zoeanne Murphy, also at The Post (video) and Nicole Narea at Vox.

Briefly:

• For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has in important ways receded from view[:] Very little is known about how the justices are conducting their work in the midst of the pandemic or how they plan to proceed.”
• Linda Greenhouse writes in an op-ed for The Times that “[t]he court’s behavior this week” in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, which blocked a lower court order extending the deadline for mailing absentee ballots in Wisconsin’s election because of the coronavirus pandemic, “raises the question whether the empowered conservative majority has the situational awareness to navigate the dire situation that faces the country, and whether it can avoid further displays of raw partisanship that threaten to inflict lasting institutional damage on the court itself.”

• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Samuel Spital discusses Comcast v. National Association of African American-Owned Media, in which the court held 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; he maintains that although “[t]he Court’s analysis in Comcast may appear straightforward,” “it does not do justice to this critical civil rights statute in two important respects.”

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