Tuesday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jun 9, 2015 at 8:25 am

Yesterday the Court issued its decision in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, holding that the president has exclusive power to grant formal recognition to a foreign sovereign. Lyle covered the decision for this blog, Mark Walsh provided a “View from the Courtroom,” and I covered the decision in Plain English.  Other coverage comes from NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, Ariane de Vogue of CNN, Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News, Adam Liptak of The New York Times, Adam Lerner of Politico, Jacob Gershman of The Wall Street Journal, Mark Sherman of the Associated Press (via Yahoo! News), Richard Wolf of USA Today, Lawrence Hurley of Reuters, Bob Barnes and Amber Phillips of The Washington Post, and Tony Mauro of the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required).  Commentary on the decision comes from Garrett Epps for The Atlantic, Michael Dorf at Dorf on Law, and Steven Mazie for The Economist’s Democracy in America Blog (subscription or registration may be required).

Yesterday the Court also issued orders from its June 4 Conference, adding three new cases to its docket for next Term.  Lyle covered the orders for this blog, while at his Election Law Blog Rick Hasen focused on the Court’s grant in Shapiro v. Mack, in which the Court will weigh in on a standard for determining whether a special three-judge U.S. District Court should hear a redistricting case.  At Mayer Brown’s Class Defense Blog, Tim Bishop (and others) discuss the grant in the class-action case Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, arguing that a decision in favor of Tyson Foods “may reinforce the demanding standards for obtaining class certification, making it more difficult for plaintiffs to obtain the settlement leverage that comes with certification and potentially discouraging plaintiffs from filing new class actions and collective actions in the future.”

Greg Stohr of Bloomberg Business covers the Court’s denial of review in Jackson v. City and County of San Francisco, a challenge to the city’s restrictions on the storage of handguns in the home.  Writing for Greenwire, Jeremy Jacobs reports on the Court’s denial of review of a lower court ruling that a coal depot’s “general permit did not cover non-stormwater discharges of coal debris into Resurrection Bay in southern Alaska.”

Briefly:

• At the Keen News Service, Lisa Keen looks back at last week’s decision in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, reversing the Tenth Circuit’s ruling that the retailer could not be held liable for failing to hire a Muslim teenager who wears a headscarf when the woman had failed to notify the company that she would need accommodations, and observes that “[i]t is a rare occasion when LGBT legal activists find themselves on the same side of a case as the conservative Christian Legal Society and the National Association of Evangelicals.”
• With the tenth anniversary of the Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London occurring this month, Tony Mauro interviews Scott Bullock, the lawyer who argued the case, for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required).
• At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Nancy Leong argues that last week’s decision in Elonis v. United States, involving the prosecution of threats made on Facebook, was “something of an anticlimax.”
• At the Maddow Blog, Steve Benen cites an exchange at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Affordable Care Act as evidence to argue that, as “much of the political world wait for the Supreme Court to issue its ruling in the King v. Burwell case, Republicans at least pretend to believe that the Affordable Care Act was written in such a way as to deny subsidies – on purpose – to consumers who enrolled through healthcare.gov.”

Kali Borkoski also contributed to this round-up.

[Disclosure:  John Elwood, a frequent contributor to this blog, is among the counsel to Anthony Elonis.  However, I am not involved in the case in any way.]

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