Thursday round-up

Briefly:

• At Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro asks several “Supreme Court practitioners for their current thinking on why so few women argue before the Supreme Court, and what can or should be done about it.”
• More Perfect (podcast) looks at Jesner v. Arab Bank, in which the justices will decide whether corporations are liable under the Alien Tort Statute, noting that the case “could reshape the way America responds to human rights abuses abroad.”
• In an op-ed for The Hill, Scott Sundby weighs in on Ayestas v. Davis, which involves the standards for funding an investigation establishing an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim in a capital case, arguing that “Ayestas’ case asks no more of the Supreme Court than to allow his attorneys to give the jurors the information they need to carry out their duty.”

• At the Legal Sports Report, Dustin Gouker notes that in its amicus brief on the side of the sports associations in Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a constitutional challenge to the federal ban on sports betting, the U.S. solicitor general’s office “opines that SCOTUS does not have to rule that PASPA stands in whole or not at all,” but could instead “’excise’ some of the language of the statute … if it fears that it is unconstitutional as written.”
• The NFIB blog urges the Supreme Court to review a regulatory-takings case in which “the landowner has been forced to maintain his land as an effective nature preserve for the public’s benefit, without opportunity for compensation.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse suggests that the worries Chief Justice John Roberts expressed at the oral argument in partisan-gerrymandering case Gill v. Whitford about jeopardizing the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy in the eyes of the public” by wading into politically fraught areas of election law may lead him to decide that “the court’s best interests are served by sitting … out” other “highly charged political cases” “as the next redistricting cycle grows ever closer.”

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