Thursday round-up

As the court prepares to release opinions this morning, Amy Howe describes the 14 remaining cases from October Term 2017 for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. At Constitution Daily, Scott Bomboy highlights “four big cases still on the docket.” Kedar Bhatia offers an interim stat pack containing statistics on all this term’s cases to date for this blog.

For this blog, and originally at Howe on the Court, Amy Howe reports that the challengers in a North Carolina partisan-gerrymandering case currently on the Supreme Court’s cert docket, Rucho v. Common Cause, have “urged the justices not to send the case back to the lower court” after Monday’s decision in Gill v. Whitford, which found that Wisconsin partisan-gerrymandering plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the statewide legislative map. At the Election Law Blog, Nicholas Stephanopolous maintains that the challengers’ supplemental briefs show that “it shouldn’t be very difficult to satisfy Whitford’s new standing requirements—at least for most plaintiffs in most districts.”

 Briefly:

• For the Associated Press, Jessica Gresko reports that today the justices will consider for the first time Dassey v. Dittmann, a cert petition filed by one of the subjects of the Netflix documentary series “Making a Murderer” that urges the justices to remind courts “that a juvenile’s age and intelligence must be seriously weighed as part of a decision on whether a confession can be used against them.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Alan Morrison observes that in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, which held a Minnesota law banning political apparel at polling places to be facially overbroad, “Chief Justice Roberts gave a victory to the First Amendment petitioners, but the decision rested on a ground so narrow that the State can resurrect virtually the same barriers to free speech if it does so more carefully.”
• In an episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal joins the hosts “to talk about the partisan gerrymandering decisions [and] Fane Lozman’s second win at SCOTUS, and to make predictions for the rest of the term.”
• At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that although Monday’s “per curiam opinion in the Maryland gerrymandering case, Benisek v. Lamone, did next to nothing to resolve the issue it raised,” “[i]t reminded practitioners and others that ‘in chambers’ opinions still matter.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Ria Tabacco Mar argues that the court’s decision on Monday not to “stop South Dakota from killing a man who may have been sentenced to death because he is gay” “sent a deeply troubling message about the value placed on the lives of L.G.B.T. people.”
• In an op-ed for Forbes, Nick Sibilla maintains that Timbs v. Indiana, in which the court will decide next term whether the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause applies to the states, gives the justices “a new opportunity to roll back unduly harsh civil penalties.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse contends that the soon-to-be-announced outcome in Janus v. AFSCME, in which the court will decide whether an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment, “more than any other case this term will reveal to us the heart and soul of the Roberts Court at the end of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s 14th year.” [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.]

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