Thursday round-up

By Edith Roberts
on Apr 13, 2017 at 7:33 am

For the Associated Press, Jessica Gresko describes the “menial duties for the newest justice” that Justice Neil Gorsuch has just assumed. At Supreme Court Brief, Tony Mauro reports that Neal Katyal of Hogan Lovells is scheduled to take the podium in a civil procedure case next Monday, and that if “Gorsuch stands up and exits, that will be the signal that he is recusing himself from the case—possibly because of Katyal’s important role in Gorsuch’s Senate confirmation last month.” At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the transcripts of Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing to “provide a spectrum” of the senators’ views of the nomination and to “hint at nuances in each of the Senators’ preferences.” At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley reports that if “Democrats thought it was hard to stop President Donald Trump’s first U.S. Supreme Court nominee, it promises to be even tougher for them if he gets to fill another vacancy, potentially to replace the most influential justice, Anthony Kennedy.” In a column in The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse argues that by “making an existing Supreme Court vacancy a highly visible part of an electoral strategy,” Republicans have placed “the court in a position of real institutional peril.”

Briefly:

• At NBC News, Rich Gardella reports on the “long battle” of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) “to pass a bill that she says would make the justices more transparent about and accountable for conduct outside the Court” by requiring them “to create and follow a code of ethics.”
• In The New Yorker, Lincoln Caplan reports that at their conference today, the justices will consider a cert petition filed by seven Arkansas death-row inmates who are challenging the state’s attempt execute them “between Monday and the end of the month” “on the ground that Arkansas’s hurried schedule [is] ‘an affront’ to their ‘basic human dignity.’”
• At Law.com, Tony Mauro looks at the “awkward dilemma” that arises when a justice mispronounces words or names during oral argument.

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