Friday round-up

At Newsweek, Marie Solis reports on National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a First Amendment challenge by crisis-pregnancy centers to a California law that, among other things, requires licensed centers to post notices to inform patients about the availability of state-funded family-planning services, including abortion; she notes that, according to one expert, “the First Amendment community often finds itself divided over free speech issues that have to do with consumer services, like those CPCs provide.” At Take Care, David Gans weighs in on the case, arguing that the centers’ “unforgiving view of the First Amendment—which has never been the law and is badly out of step with decisions such as Citizens United—would gut a vast array of disclosure laws and leave consumers in the dark about critically important matters.”  Additional commentary comes from Maggie Jo Buchanan and others at the Center for American Progress and Robin Marty at Dame.

Briefly:

• For the Los Angeles Times, David Savage reports on a pending cert petition, Kisela v. Hughes, which involves the standards for granting qualified immunity to police officers in Section 1983 civil-rights suits, noting that “[i]n recent years, the justices have regularly shielded police from being sued, even when officers wrongly shoot innocent people in their own homes.”

• At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that “[t]he Trump Administration’s effort to close down the “DACA” program is now on a slightly faster schedule in a lower appeals court, but the plan may be too tight to get the case to the Supreme Court for any action during the current term.”
• At Law360 (subscription required), Diana Novak Jones reports on two cert petitions that “challenge whether a Colorado prison’s policy of not allowing prisoners in solitary confinement to exercise outside for the one hour a day they are allowed out of their primary cells comports with the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.”
• At the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates “talk about cases challenging capital punishment, Seminole Rock deference, and more,” and they “also chat with John Elwood about SCOTUSBlog’s Relist Watch and his argument pump up songs.”
• At Bloomberg, Christopher Palmeri reports that, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a constitutional challenge to the federal ban on sports betting, “this could be the last March Madness where Americans have to go to Nevada to bet legally on the college basketball championship.”
• The editorial board of the New York Sun deplores the fact that “the State Department just signed a brief that puts the Trump administration on the side of the PLO — and against American victims of terror” in Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Organization, a cert petition that stems from “a lawsuit launched in federal court in New York by American victims of a number of terror attacks in Israel.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse maintains that “[t]he legacy of Justice Antonin Scalia, two years after his death, is being erased”: “When faced with interpreting an act of Congress, his colleagues evidently now feel free to invoke legislative history … without tiptoeing over the hot coals of his scorn.”

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