Tuesday round-up

At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that, in a brief opposing cert in Frank v. Gaos, “Google Inc. has told the U.S. Supreme Court there was nothing unfair or unreasonable about the tech company’s $8.5 million settlement of a class action in which $5.3 million of the funds go to third parties and none to members of the class.” At Reuters, Alison Frankel looks at both sides’ arguments in the case, which asks whether “cy pres – the practice of distributing class action settlement money to court-approved charities instead of class members – perverts the intention of the federal rules enabling class actions.”

Briefly:

• At the Constitutional Accountability Center, Ashwin Phatak looks at Parker v. Montgomery County Correctional Facility, a cert petition that “raises a critically important question about prisoners’ ability to access the court system.”
• At the Whistleblowers Protection Blog, Aaron Jordan highlights an amicus brief supporting “FBI whistleblower John Parkinson’s [cert petition] seeking review of the Federal Circuit’s decision denying veterans’ preference-eligible FBI employees the right to raise whistleblowing as an affirmative defense in an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.”

• At ThinkProgress, Kyla Mandell weighs in on a cert petition in which “[m]ining groups [have asked] the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an Obama-era rule banning uranium mining near Grand Canyon National Park in the latest push to open up public lands to industry.”
• Also at ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser calls National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a First Amendment challenge by crisis-pregnancy centers to a California law requiring disclosures about the availability of publicly funded family-planning services, including contraception and abortion, “a different kind of abortion case — one that forces the Court to untangle a difficult First Amendment web woven by its own decisions.”
• At Vinson & Elkins’ Lincoln’s Law Blog, Ralph Mayrell and John Elwood monitor the 10 False Claims Act cases currently on the Supreme Court’s docket.
• Subscript offers a graphic explainer for Upper Skagit Indian Tribe v. Lundgren, in which the justices will consider tribal immunity from state-court actions to adjudicate title to land.
• At The World and Everything In It, Mary Reichard analyzes the oral arguments in Ohio v. American Express Co., which involves the application of antitrust law to credit-card-network anti-steering rules, and Rosales-Mireles v. United States, which asks when erroneous applications of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines should be corrected on plain-error review.
• At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that the government has told the lower court that it “wants the controversy over the ‘DACA’ program for younger undocumented immigrants to be back at the Supreme Court in time for initial action before the Justices’ summer recess.”

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