Tuesday round-up
on Jun 10, 2014 at 7:43 am
It was a busy, if not particularly momentous, day at the Supreme Court yesterday. The Court did not grant any new cases from its Conference last week, but it issued three opinions in argued cases. In Executive Benefits Insurance Agency v. Arkison, a unanimous Court held that even if a bankruptcy court does not have jurisdiction to enter a final judgment, it can still issue proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law to be reviewed de novo by the district court. Coverage of the Court’s decision comes from Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST and Daniel Fisher of Forbes, while in his column for Bloomberg View Noah Feldman praises the decision as “show[ing] that there are limits to the extreme formalism that the court has recently adopted in many cases.”
In CTS Corp. v. Waldburger, the Court held that North Carolina’s statute of repose (which prohibits lawsuits brought more than ten years after the defendant’s last culpable act) is not preempted by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) – commonly known as the Superfund law – which instead only preempts state statutes of limitations on bringing state-law environmental tort cases. I provided initial coverage for this blog; other coverage comes from Nina Totenberg and Rebecca Buchwalter-Poza of NPR, Adam Liptak of The New York Times, Greenwire’s Jeremy P. Jacobs, and Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST. In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports on the impact of the decision not only for the North Carolina landowners directly involved in the case, but also for veterans and their families seeking to recover for injuries caused by contaminated drinking water at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
In the third decision of the day, Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio, the Court held that the Board of Immigration Appeals reasonably interpreted federal immigration laws to allow family visas to be issued to some, but not all, applicants who “age out” – that is, turn twenty-one – while their applications are pending. Kevin Johnson provided the main coverage of the decision for this blog, while I provided an early report; other coverage comes from Nina Totenberg of NPR and Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST.
Briefly:
- At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Leslie Griffin summarizes some of the “fun facts” that emerged from last week’s release of documents from the Clinton White House related to (as relevant here) the nominations of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
- At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re considers the possible limits on the Court’s power to revise its opinions.
- At The Hill’s Congress Blog, Ilya Shapiro looks ahead to the upcoming decision in Harris v. Quinn, in which the Court is considering whether it violates the First Amendment for home health-care workers who are paid by the state to be required to pay to support unions that represent them, and urges the Court to “act now to protect workers’ associational and expressive rights.”
- At the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Text and History Blog, Joey Meyer criticizes Justice Antonin Scalia’s concurring opinion in last week’s decision in Bond v. United States, in which the Court held that a Pennsylvania woman who attempted to poison her husband’s mistress could not be prosecuted in federal court.
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