Thursday round-up

Briefly:

• At Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle report that according to Steven Anderson of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the PLF’s “formula” for a successful cert petition, like the one in property-rights case Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania, which the court granted on Monday, combines “’evil villains, outrageous facts, and sympathetic clients.’”
• At Justia’s Verdict blog, Michael Dorf argues that Justice Clarence Thomas’ plurality opinion in Patchak v. Zinke, in which a divided court affirmed a lower-court decision dismissing a lawsuit for lack of jurisdiction in response to a congressional statute, answers Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent with what “appears to be a non sequitur.”
• At The Federalist, Donald Daugherty reviews Kimberly Robinson’s new book, “American Justice 2017: The Supreme Court in Crisis,” concluding that “Robinson succeeds in turning a sleepy term into an interesting read, even without any real crisis.”

• At Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt considers an original-jurisdiction action thirteen states are attempting to bring in the Supreme Court against California and Massachusetts, challenging animal-welfare laws that have allegedly costing consumers in the complaining states hundreds of millions of dollars in higher egg prices; Ehrenhalt notes that “it’s the return of the Commerce Clause that’s the most striking element in all this maneuvering.”
• Inversecondemnation discusses a cert-stage reply brief in a case about “whether property owners who sue the federal government for a taking are entitled to both an Article III forum, and to have the issues determined by a jury,” agreeing with the petitioners that “[i]f you have no forum or remedy, after all, you really have no right.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman looks at “dissenting coalitions that brought the right and left wings of the Court together between the 2010 term when Justice Kagan joined the Court and the end of [last] term.”
• At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick endorses Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s message, expressed most recently in remarks to an association of college-student-affairs professionals, of “empathy, listening, compromise.”
• At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that at an event honoring Justice Thurgood Marshall, Justice Elena “Kagan and three other former Marshall clerks offered their recollections of their year with the man who has been hailed as the most important lawyer of the 20th century.”
• In an op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel, David Keating and Thomas Wheatley weigh in on Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, Florida, in which the justices will decide whether the existence of probable cause defeats a retaliatory-arrest claim, arguing that “the court should consider the presence of probable cause holistically without automatically extinguishing a First Amendment claim.”
• At Rolling Stone, Ryan Reed offers highlights from the trailer for “RBG,” a new documentary about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that “chronicles Ginsburg’s early quest for gender equality in the workplace following advancements of the civil rights movement.”

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