Tuesday round-up

By Edith Roberts
on Dec 20, 2016 at 6:25 am

At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that a New Mexico lawyer’s effort to compel the Senate to vote on the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court “may have reached its final point on Monday morning” when Chief Justice John Roberts denied an emergency request for an injunction; Roberts “acted without giving any reason, without sharing the issue with his colleagues, and even without seeking a response from the Senate.” Marcia Coyle covers the story for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), noting that the lawyer’s “legal efforts on behalf of Garland failed for lack of standing in the district court and in the D.C. Circuit.” At Politico, Josh Gerstein reports that Garland “is going back to his day job hearing cases as chief judge of the D.C. Circuit,” and that a “calendar of upcoming oral arguments the D.C. Circuit updated on its website Monday shows Garland assigned to three cases to be heard Jan. 18, two days before Trump’s inauguration.” Additional coverage of Garland’s return to his previous seat on the bench comes from Cristian Farias at The Huffington Post.

Briefly:

• At E&E News, Amanda Reilly and Robin Bravender discuss five ways in which one or more Supreme Court appointments by Donald Trump could affect “major environmental law issues,” including “courts’ deference to federal agencies on major rules and how the courts tackle regulatory costs and property rights.”
• In The National Law Review, Joseph Facciponti and Joseph Moreno look at the court’s decision last week in Shaw v. United States, a bank-fraud case in which the court rejected the defendant’s argument that he could not be found liable under the federal bank-fraud statute if he only intended to defraud a third party, not the bank itself; they observe that in “addition – and perhaps inadvertently – the Supreme Court also confirmed the bank fraud statute’s place among the tools that federal law enforcement can use to tackle cybercrime.”

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