Tuesday round-up

Yesterday the justices issued orders from last week’s conference, granting no new cases and taking no action on several high-profile cert petitions. Amy Howe covers the order list for this blog, in a post first published at Howe on the Court. At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports that the justices “rejected appeals from Sherwin-Williams Co. and Conagra Brands Inc., leaving intact a ruling that requires [the companies] to pay more than $400 million for lead-paint remediation in California.” Additional coverage comes from David Savage for the Los Angeles Times, who reports that “[b]usiness lawyers said they fear the decision will give a green light to other suits seeking to hold manufacturers liable for damage inflicted on the public, including the opioid crisis and climate change.”

In an op-ed for Forbes, Richard Samp writes that in Nielsen v. Preap, which involves the immigration law’s mandatory detention provision, last week’s “oral argument left little doubt about the likely outcome: Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Kavanaugh will vote to overturn the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s constricted interpretation of the government’s detention authority.” At SCOTUS OA, Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag agree with this prediction, noting that their “empirical analysis of the Preap oral argument suggests that Kavanaugh will be loyal to the Republicans”; they go on to observe that “[c]onsidering all four cases the Court heard in Kavanaugh’s first week on the Bench, the newest justice may not be ideologically moderate, but so far he has been moderate in his behavior, in some senses.”

Briefly:

• At Law360 (subscription required), Jimmy Hoover and others present the results of a series of interviews in which “practitioners and experts described how everything from the pipeline of Supreme Court clerks to the preferences of corporate clients — perhaps the most important factor — contributes to the sharp gender disparity [in oral arguments] at the high court.”
• At Take Care, Michael Klarman explains why Democrats should favor adding additional seats to the Supreme Court.
• At USA Today, Joel Shannon reports that “[a] Brooklyn, New York, bookstore is planning an event for people angered by the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court: A public hex.”
• In The World and Everything in It (podcast), Mary Reichard discusses the oral arguments in two cases involving the Armed Career Criminal Act’s sentencing-enhancement provisions — Stokeling v. United States and United States v. Sims – and in Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania, which asks whether a property owner with a Fifth Amendment takings claim can go straight to federal court.

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