Tuesday round-up

For The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin and Saleh Al-Batati report that “[a] disabled Yemeni girl, whose exclusion from the U.S. was questioned by Supreme Court justices reviewing the Trump administration’s travel ban, arrived Saturday in New York for resettlement.” At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, David Bier writes that the “confidential report” cited by the solicitor general during oral argument in the travel-ban case, Trump v. Hawaii, as evidence that the government conducted an “’extensive’ analysis of ‘every country in the world,’ … [proving] that the president did not act with religious animus,” is “just 16 pages with a one-page attachment,” suggesting that this “’extensive’ review simply never happened.” At Good Judgment, Ryan Adler considers the challenges involved in forecasting the outcome in the case, noting that “[w]hile there has been no shortage of coverage of the case and its varied legal, political, and social ramifications, the reality is that forecasters aren’t working with much over the life of this case before the high court.”

Briefly:

• At the Associated Press, Mark Sherman reports that a “flood of lawsuits over LGBT rights is making its way through courts and will continue, no matter the outcome in the Supreme Court’s highly anticipated decision in the case of a Colorado baker who would not create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.”
• At New York, Simon van Zuylen-Wood observes that “[t]he metamorphosis of milquetoast Neil Gorsuch” into a Supreme Court justice who “seems to share with the president who nominated him — as well as the senator who oversaw his confirmation — a cavalier attitude toward institutional stability” “has baffled people who’ve followed [Gorsuch] for years.”
• First Mondays (podcast) features a discussion of last week’s two opinions.
• At the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates “break down the Supreme Court’s arbitration decision, Ginsburg’s epic dissent, and other orders,” and “SCOTUS all-star Kannon Shanmugam stops by to reminisce about his many impressive bosses.”
• At PrawfsBlawg, David Orentlicher discusses “three models for ideological balance on the Supreme Court that also could be extended to the lower courts.”
• At Turtle Talk, Jennifer Weddle notes that the court’s “restraint” in Upper Skagit Indian Tribe v. Lundgren, in which the justices remanded a property dispute involving an Indian tribe to the lower court for it to consider an alternative common-law basis for its holding that the tribe was not immune from suit, “is appreciated in Indian Country.”
• At In Justice Today, Kyle Barry looks at a cert petition challenging a lower court’s grant of qualified immunity to a police officer in an excessive-force suit, arguing that “[w]hether the Court applies a uniform standard going forward — correcting errors not just to protect police but also victims of police brutality — is not just an academic matter.”
• At Salon, David Daley suggests that the upcoming decisions in this term’s two partisan-gerrymandering cases “might not only be the last best chance to set a new, fairer national standard, but the last perfect chance.”
• At Take Care, Leah Litman considers what light Azar v. Garza, in which the federal government has asked the Supreme Court to nullify a lower-court ruling that cleared the way for a pregnant undocumented teenager to obtain an abortion, sheds on “the Trump administration’s (and DHHS’s in particular) authority over undocumented minors.”
• Howard Wasserman shares his impressions of “RBG,” the new documentary about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at PrawfsBlawg.
• At The World and Everything In It, Mary Reichard unpacks the oral arguments in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, which asks whether SEC administrative law judges are “officers of the United States” within the meaning of the appointments clause, and Lagos v. United States, in which the justices will decide whether private investigation costs and a victim’s attorney’s fees are considered compensable losses under the Mandatory Victim Restitution Act.
• In These Times features a discussion of “what’s at stake … and how … unions should respond” in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in which the court is considering whether an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in this case.]
• At Stanford Law School’s Legal Aggregate blog, David Freeman Engstrom remarks that in Epic Systems v. Lewis, in which the court held that arbitration clauses in employment contracts that require employees to forgo class and collective actions are enforceable, “[w]hat jars for me is the casualness of Justice Gorsuch’s rejection of the rich historical materials at his disposal in favor of cool, acontextual canons.”

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