Friday round-up

By Edith Roberts
on Jun 9, 2017 at 7:22 am

At the National Conference of State Legislatures Blog, Lisa Soronen discusses Town of Chester v. Laroe Estates, Inc., in which the justices ruled this week that an as-of-right intervenor must have standing if it is seeking relief not requested by a plaintiff in the case, noting that the “court didn’t address the issue of whether intervenors must possess standing to intervene as a matter of right if they seek the same relief as the plaintiff.” At Stanford Law School’s Legal Aggregate blog, Shirin Sinnar explains that the decision “may make it harder for parties that aren’t originally part of a lawsuit to participate in litigation, for better or for worse,” noting that such participation “often occurs in public law contexts, where the outcome of the case may affect a lot of people beyond the original parties.”

Briefly:

• In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that the justices have released their 2016 financial disclosure forms, and that “Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. sold as much as $500,000 inMicrosoft stock last year just 10 days before the U.S. Supreme Court granted review in the still-pending class-action case Microsoft v. Baker,” which enabled him “to participate in the case instead of recusing.”
• The Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast features a discussion of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court short list and an interview with FantasySCOTUS creator Josh Blackman.
• In Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer reports that nearly 18 months after his victory in Montgomery v. Louisiana, in which the court gave retroactive effect to an earlier decision prohibiting mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders, “Montgomery is still sitting in Angola [state prison], and there’s no guarantee that he—or many of the roughly 1,000 others serving similar sentences across the country—will ever get out.”
• At the National Conference of State Legislatures Blog, Lisa Soronen looks at Carpenter v. United States, in which the justices will decide whether the government must obtain a warrant for historical records showing where a cell phone connects with towers, observing that “Fourth Amendment watchers have known the U.S. Supreme Court would agree to decide a cell-site location case sooner rather than later.”

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