Friday round-up

Briefly:

• At CNN, Joan Biskupic writes that the Supreme Court has planned test runs with lawyers for its first-ever livestreamed arguments next week and begun devising time limits for the justices’ own questioning,” but “if the nine want a prototype of how another nine jurists heard an important case via telephone, they might tune into the give-and-take at what has been dubbed ‘the second highest court.’”
• Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, on the experiences of other countries’ highest courts that have live-streamed video of oral arguments, concluding that “live-streaming has worked well – even in … high-profile cases.”
• At Reuters, Ted Hesson provides an explainer for Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, a challenge to the government’s decision to terminate the DACA program, which allowed immigrants brought to this country illegally as children to apply for protection from deportation.

• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Samuel Bray runs down the amicus briefs and related articles discussing “the scope of the injunction” in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, a challenge to the federal govt’s expansion of the “conscience exemption” to the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate that will be argued next week.
• Law360 reports that the court has given “Pennsylvania until May 4 to reply to a [stay application] accusing the commonwealth of trampling on constitutional rights as it ordered certain nonessential businesses to close their doors as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.”
• At Balkinization, Simon Lazarus warns that “Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, in three too-little-noted cases over the past several months, have heralded their zeal to resuscitate two long-defunct doctrines imposing drastic constitutional constraints on federal authority,” which “would hamstring current and future federal anti-pandemic strategies.”
• The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) laments that after the court’s decision on Monday to dismiss as moot a high-profile Second Amendment case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, it “looks like we have a Whitehouse Effect in which Chief Justice John Roberts can be moved by political threats to judicial independence.”
• At the SMU Law Review Forum, Leslie Griffin examines the Supreme Court’s recent religion clause decisions and pending cases, raising the possibility “that, during the 2019 Term, the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause will expand even more protection for religious freedom.”
• Supreme Court reporter and teacher Steven Mazie gives a video rundown on how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the Supreme Court.

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