Petitions We’re Watching

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Petitions We're Watching
Docket Case Page Issue(s)
18-1382 American Eagle Express Inc. v. Bedoya (1) Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit erred by holding that New Jersey’s statutory test for determining employment classification is not pre-empted under the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, applying a novel pre-emption test that conflicts with the decisions of the Supreme Court and deepening the already existing circuit split; and (2) whether the presumption against pre-emption applies in the context of a statutory express pre-emption clause when the claims at issue involve areas historically regulated by the states.
18-1455 Archdiocese of Washington v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (1) Whether the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority’s policy of refusing to accept advertisements that promote or oppose religion or reflect a religious perspective violates the First Amendment; and (2) whether that discrimination against religious speech violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
22O150 Arizona v. California
18-1140 Avco Corp. v. Sikkelee Whether the Federal Aviation Act pre-empts state-law design-defect claims.
17-1530 Banca UBAE, S.p.A. v. Peterson Whether a federal appellate court is required to decide personal jurisdiction over a defendant when the record in the trial court and on appeal is complete, the parties briefed the issue in the trial court and on appeal, but the appellate court ignored the question.
17-1534 Bank Markazi v. Peterson Whether a foreign sovereign’s property outside of the United States is entitled to sovereign immunity.
18-1541 Baouch v. Werner Enterprises Inc. Whether, and under what circumstances, per diem payments to an employee constitute wages, rather than reimbursement, under Section 207(e)(2) of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
18-1218 Buchwald Capital Advisors LLC v. Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians Whether the Bankruptcy Code abrogates the sovereign immunity of Indian tribes.
17-1529 Clearstream Banking S.A. v. Peterson Whether foreign sovereign property held by a foreign financial intermediary in a foreign country may, under any circumstances, be subject to execution in United States courts.
18-1465 County of San Diego, California v. Mann (1) Whether a parent claiming substantive due process violations needs to demonstrate that the county’s conduct “shocks the conscience,” as five circuits have held, or whether omissions by the county—i.e., the lack of obtaining parental notice and consent—alone result in municipal liability, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held below; (2) whether parental notice and consent (or a court order) are prerequisites to a child’s medical examination, even if (i) the exams are diagnostic and do not involve treatment decisions; and (ii) any investigatory purpose of the examinations is incidental to the primary purposes of protecting the child’s health and preventing the spread of contagious disease; and (3) whether, in conducting its “special needs” balancing test under the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit erred by disregarding the government’s interest in protecting the health of other children and center staff.
18-1482 Cunningham v. U.S. Whether a finding of “circumstantial guarantees of trustworthiness” may be premised on a district court’s belief in the truth of the hearsay statement, and its assessment of the credibility of the hearsay witnesses, rather than the circumstances surrounding the making of the statement.
18-1469 Department of Homeland Security v. Casa de Maryland (1) Whether the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to wind down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy is judicially reviewable; and (2) whether DHS’s decision to wind down the DACA policy is lawful.
18-1539 Domino’s Pizza LLC v. Robles Whether Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires a website or mobile-phone application that offers goods or services to the public to satisfy discrete accessibility requirements with respect to individuals with disabilities.
18-1530 Enplas Display Device Corp. v. Seoul Semiconductor Company, Ltd. Whether, in view of the presumption against extraterritoriality, a foreign defendant’s foreign sales of components to a foreign company qualify as induced infringement, when the defendant knew of, at most, a risk that the components might be incorporated by third parties into infringing products that might be sold by other third parties in the United States.
19-71 FNU Tanzin v. Tanvir Whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb, permits suits seeking money damages against individual federal employees.
18-1428 Gatehouse Media New York Holdings Inc. v. New York Whether an application to a trial court by the press, as a surrogate for the public, in exercising its constitutionally required ability to be heard in opposition to a denial of the presumptive First Amendment right of access to voir dire questionnaires used to select the jury in a controversial murder prosecution may be denied by the failure of state criminal procedural rules to authorize standing for that purpose.
19-54 Givens v. Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC Whether district courts have power, before the trial on just compensation, to issue a preliminary injunction granting immediate possession of property to a pipeline company in a condemnation proceeding under the Natural Gas Act.
18-956 Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc. (1) Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and (2) whether, as the jury found, the petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.
18-1362 Hall v. Merrill Whether, and under what circumstances, a candidate can continue to challenge a ballot-access rule after the election over which he originally sued has passed.
18-1449 Harvey v. Florida Whether the Florida Supreme Court’s decision denying retroactive application of the Hurst decisions to the petitioner violates the Eighth and 14th Amendments because it uses an arbitrary cut-off point and other arbitrary factors—such as the timing of judicial decisions—to determine whether similarly situated death row prisoners will receive retroactive application of constitutional rights.
18-817 Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. Whether patents that claim a method of medically treating a patient automatically satisfy Section 101 of the Patent Act, even if they apply a natural law using only routine and conventional steps.
18-415 HP Inc. v. Berkheimer Whether patent eligibility is a question of law for the court based on the scope of the claims or a question of fact for the jury based on the state of the art at the time of the patent.
18-1285 Hyatt v. Iancu Whether the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure Section 1207.04 violates patent applicants’ statutory right of appeal following a second rejection.
18-1219 Illinois v. Bonilla (1) Whether a sniff by a drug-detection dog conducted in the common area of an apartment building is a Fourth Amendment search under Florida v. Jardines; and (2) whether, if the dog-sniff was an unreasonable search, the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies.
18-1154 Integrity Staffing Solutions Inc. v. Busk (1) Whether the Portal-to-Portal Act modified the Fair Labor Standards Act’s broad, pre-1947 definition of “work”; and (2) whether the FLSA’s definition of “work” requires exertion beyond the minimal effort involved in passing through a security screening.
18-1323 June Medical Services LLC v. Gee Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit’s decision upholding Louisiana’s law requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital conflicts with the Supreme Court’s binding precedent in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
18-1276 Levert v. U.S. Whether, or under what circumstances, a criminal defendant pursuing a second or successive motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 is entitled to relief under a retroactive constitutional decision invalidating a federal statutory provision, when the record is silent as to whether the district court based on its original judgment on that provision or another provision of the same statute.
19-64 Lilley v. New Hampshire (1) Whether an ordinance expressly punishing only women, but not men, for identical conduct—being topless in public—classifies on the basis of gender; and (2) whether an ordinance criminalizing exposure of “the female breast,” under which only women are prosecuted for public exposure of their areolas, violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
18-1386 Lipschultz v. Charter Advanced Services, LLC (1) Whether, in the absence of a Federal Communications Commission decision classifying Voice over Internet Protocol service as an information service, FCC policy can conflict with and pre-empt state regulation of VoIP service; and (2) whether VoIP service is a telecommunications service or an information service, under the appropriate functional test for classification determinations from Brand X.
18-1513 Michigan v. Frederick (1) Whether the Fourth Amendment applies to knock-and-talk encounters; (2) whether, if it does, the Michigan Supreme Court correctly held that a predawn visit constitutes a constitutional trespass in violation of the implied license to approach; and (3) whether, if it does, the Michigan Supreme Court correctly held that “any attempt to gather information,” including simply asking the occupants for consent to search, combined with a constitutional trespass, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment.
18-1492 Miller v. Inslee Whether Washington’s compelling nonmember providers to accept a private organization as their exclusive representative for dealing with the state over public policy is one of the “other contexts” in which the “significant impingement on associational freedoms” is not tolerated by the First Amendment.
19-47 Morgan v. Schott Whether Heck v. Humphrey bars Section 1983 claims for damages in mixed-sanctions cases when the inmate challenges only the nondurational elements of the sanction, expressly forfeiting the right to challenge any addition to the length of his criminal sentence.
18-1367 Norfolk Southern Railway Co. v. Sumner Whether the Federal Employers Liability Act permits liability when a plaintiff cannot meet the common-law standard of proof for but-for causation.
18-1224 NuStar Energy Services v. ING Bank N.V. Whether a party that physically supplies a vessel with fuel or other necessaries possesses a statutory maritime lien when the vessel owner or its authorized agent ordered those necessaries and directed the supplier to provide them, regardless of contractual relationships between the vessel owner and intermediate parties.
18-1211 NuStar Energy Services v. ING Bank N.V. Whether a party that physically supplies a vessel with fuel or other necessaries possesses a statutory maritime lien when the vessel owner or its authorized agent ordered those necessaries and directed the supplier to provide them, regardless of contractual relationships between the vessel owner and intermediate parties.
18-349 Patterson v. Walgreen Co. (1) Whether an accommodation that merely lessens or has the potential to eliminate the conflict between work and religious practice is “reasonable” per se, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 1st, 4th and 11th Circuits hold; does it instead create a jury question, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 8th and 10th Circuits hold; or must an accommodation fully eliminate the conflict in order to be “reasonable” as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th and 9th Circuits hold; (2) whether speculation about possible future burdens is sufficient to meet the employer’s burden in establishing “undue hardship,” as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 5th, 6th and 11th Circuits hold, or must the employer demonstrate an actual burden, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 4th, 8th, 9th and 10th Circuits hold; and (3) whether the portion of TWA v. Hardison opining that “undue hardship” simply means something more than a “de minimis cost” should be disavowed or overruled.
19-16 Peithman v. U.S. Whether 18 U.S.C. § 981(a)(1)(C) authorizes forfeiture imposed jointly and severally among co-conspirators, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 6th and 8th Circuits have held, or whether such joint and several liability is foreclosed under the reasoning of Honeycutt v. United States, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit has held.
18-1401 Peterson v. Linear Controls Inc. Whether the “terms, conditions, or privileges of employment” covered by Section 703(a)(1) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are limited only to hiring, firing, promotions, compensation and leave.
18-1516 Price v. City of Chicago, Illinois Whether the Supreme Court should reconsider Hill v. Colorado in light of the Supreme Court’s intervening decisions in Reed v. Town of Gilbert and McCullen v. Coakley.
18-926 Putnam Investments, LLC v. Brotherston (1) Whether an ERISA plaintiff bears the burden of proving that “losses to the plan result[ed] from” a fiduciary breach, as the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th and 11th Circuits have held, or whether ERISA defendants bear the burden of disproving loss causation, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit concluded, joining the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 4th, 5th and 8th Circuits; and (2) whether, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit concluded, showing that particular investment options did not perform as well as a set of index funds, selected by the plaintiffs with the benefit of hindsight, suffices as a matter of law to establish “losses to the plan.”
18-921 Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Juan, Puerto Rico v. Feliciano Whether the First Amendment empowers courts to override the chosen legal structure of a religious organization and declare all of its constituent parts a single legal entity subject to joint and several liability.
18-540 Rutledge v. Pharmaceutical Care Management Association Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit erred in holding that Arkansas’ statute regulating pharmacy benefit managers’ drug-reimbursement rates, which is similar to laws enacted by a substantial majority of states, is pre-empted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, in contravention of the Supreme Court’s precedent that ERISA does not pre-empt rate regulation.
18-1566 Scoville v. Securities and Exchange Commission Whether Section 929P(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act’s jurisdictional amendments conferred substantive extraterritorial reach under Sections 10(b) and 17(a) of the Securities Exchange Act in Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions and in federal criminal prosecutions.
22O65 Texas v. New Mexico
18-1424 Thomas v. Anderson Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit correctly held, in an acknowledged conflict with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, that a district court may deny a request for the issuance of a writ of habeas corpus to compel the appearance of a nonparty inmate as a witness at trial based only upon a consideration as to the inconvenience to the government of making that inmate available to testify and without regard to the importance of the potential witness’s testimony to the case at bar.
19-46 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com B.V. Whether, when the Lanham Act states generic terms may not be registered as trademarks, the addition by an online business of a generic top-level domain (“.com”) to an otherwise generic term can create a protectable trademark.
19-67 U.S. v. Sineneng-Smith Whether the federal criminal prohibition against encouraging or inducing illegal immigration for commercial advantage or private financial gain, in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) and (B)(i), is facially unconstitutional.
18-1498 UnitedHealth Group Inc. v. Peterson (1) Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit erred in holding—consistent with decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit but in conflict with those of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 3rd, 5th and 7th Circuits—that under Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. v. Bruch, which imposes a highly deferential standard of judicial review to interpretations of Employee Retirement Income Security Act plans by administrators to whom the plans delegate interpretive discretion, an administrator’s determination that an ERISA plan authorizes certain remedial actions or measures is necessarily unreasonable merely because the plan is silent on the matter; and (2) whether the Firestone deference standard allows courts to reject an otherwise reasonable plan construction that is lawful under ERISA but, in the court’s view, pushes ERISA’s boundaries.
19-58 Xitronix Corp. v. KLA-Tencor Corp. Whether appellate jurisdiction over Walker Process claims lies in the regional circuits, or in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
18-1230 Zamudio v. U.S. Whether a search-warrant application that fails to provide any particularized nexus between an individual’s alleged drug-trafficking activity and the individual’s residence can provide probable cause for a warrant to search the residence.
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