Friday round-up

For The Washington Post, Seung Min Kim and John Wagner report that “Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh moved closer to confirmation as the Senate prepared for a key vote [today], with Republicans arguing that an FBI report on sexual misconduct allegations exonerated the judge.” Nicholas Fandos and Sheryl Gay Stolberg report for The New York Times that “[w]ith four senators still undecided — the Democrat Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and the Republicans Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation was still not assured.” In an op-ed published last night in The Wall Street Journal, Kavanaugh wrote that he “might have been too emotional” at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the allegations last week, and that he “said a few things I should not have said,” but that “[g]oing forward, you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I have been for my entire 28-year legal career: hardworking, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good.” Coverage comes from Tony Mauro at The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required).

Miriam Siefert analyzes Wednesday’s argument in Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania, which asks whether the court should reconsider a precedent that requires property owners to exhaust state remedies before bringing federal takings claims under the Constitution, for this blog. At Bloomberg Law, Kimberly Robinson reports that “Justice Elena Kagan appears to be the deciding vote in whether to overturn a more than 30-year-old decision that opponents say closes the federal courthouse to many citizens whose private property is taken by government for federal use.” At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin writes that although “[p]redicting the justices’ votes based on oral argument is far from an exact science,” “property rights advocates have grounds for cautious optimism.”

Briefly:

• At the Federalist Society Review, John Baker and Michael Krauss urge the justices to “review a California Court of Appeal’s decision that holds three former lead paint manufacturers solely responsible for remediating lead paint inside hundreds of thousands of houses,” arguing that “[t]he California courts ignored two critical elements essential to any public nuisance complaint — causation and the very definition of public nuisance.”
• At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern weighs in on Gundy v. United States, in which the justices considered on Tuesday whether a provision of the federal sex-offender act violates the nondelegation doctrine, maintaining that “while a ruling against the government would be a victory for criminal justice reform, it could also be very dangerous to the progressive project.”
• In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Elizabeth Slattery and John-Michael Seibler “break down recent oral arguments in cases dealing with frogs, cemeteries, and an intelligible principle.”
• For this blog, Andrew Hamm reports that Justice Stephen Breyer yesterday “extolled the value of poetry and literature, especially in the works of William Shakespeare,” as tools for bridging differences.

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