Monday round-up
on Mar 6, 2017 at 6:49 am
In The Christian Science Monitor, Amanda Hoover reports that more than 50 companies signed on to a “friend of the court” brief in support of a transgender high school’s challenge to a Virginia school board’s bathroom policy; Hoover notes that supporting “diversity and building inclusive brands and workplaces has become as vital to some large companies as their products and advertising” and that many “of the companies signing on to the brief have long instated and upheld policies sheltering those in the LGBT community from workplace discrimination.” In the Federal Regulations Advisor, Leland Beck predicts that “the end may be near” for the case, Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., suggesting that the Trump administration’s revocation of prior government guidance on which the lower court had relied will prompt the Supreme Court to remove the case from this term’s docket. In Education Week, Mark Walsh examines the circumstances that led the “clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court” to admonish “two lawyers who wrote friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the Virginia school board” in the case “because the cover of the briefs refer to the transgender male student in the case as ‘her’ rather than ‘him.’”
In The New York Times, Adam Liptak and Nicholas Fandos report that the year Judge Neil Gorsuch spent clerking for Justice Anthony Kennedy, “the longtime center of power at the Supreme Court,” gave “Gorsuch a privileged look at the court’s workings and a crash course in its unrelenting caseload and internal politics.” In The Wall Street Journal, Jacob Gershman reports that Gorsuch worked on at least three student newspapers” during his three years at Columbia University and highlights several selections “from Gorsuch’s college clip-file.” At Politico, Elana Schor reports that after “rattling Republicans at a host of town halls protesting plans to kill Obamacare, liberal activists are zeroing in on their next target: Neil Gorsuch.” Advice and Consent (podcast) looks at Gorsuch’s record “on social issues, privacy and how it relates to larger notions of substantive due process.” At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West argue that “the Senate must postpone Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings until the investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia are resolved,” because if “the Trump victory were even somewhat abetted by shady ties to the Russians, everything he does as president is of questionable legitimacy.” In an op-ed in USA Today, Glenn Harlan Reynolds maintains that left-wing critics should be relieved that “Gorsuch appears to be devoted to interpreting the Constitution as it was understood by the Framers (in terms of its ‘original public meaning,’ to use the law professor definition), and not to embracing a living Constitution.”
Briefly:
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that a “federal appeals panel on Friday upheld the law barring anyone from making ‘a harangue or oration’ at the U.S. Supreme Court—the latest in a series of rulings protecting the high court from protesters inside the building or on its grounds.”
- At The Campaign Legal Center, Noah Lindell discusses last week’s an opinion in Bethune-Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections, in which the court upheld one of 12 Virginia electoral districts against a racial gerrymandering challenge and sent the remaining 11 back to the district court to reconsider whether race was the predominant factor in drawing the district lines, arguing that the decision “is a home run for voters,” because the court refused to let Virginia “make it harder for voters to bring racial gerrymandering claims, by allowing a state’s after-the-fact rationalizations to excuse blatant racial targeting.”
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