Wednesday round-up

At Education Week’s School Law Blog, Mark Walsh reports that in Doe v. Boyertown Area School District, “[a] group of Pennsylvania high school students has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court a lower-court ruling that upheld a school district’s policy of permitting transgender students to use restrooms or locker rooms consistent with their gender identity.” At ThinkProgress, Zack Ford notes that “[t]he Supreme Court is now being asked to consider five different cases related to LGBTQ rights this session.”

Briefly:

• At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie looks at the legal challenges to the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as deputy attorney general, including one that “comes in the guise of Michaels v Sessions, a case challenging the federal ban on guns for convicted felons that has seen its caption change to Michaels v Whitaker” during the cert petition stage. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
• At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps weighs in on Carpenter v. Murphy, in which the justices will decide whether Congress has disestablished the boundaries of an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, observing that “[r]ecognizing the reservation, the state’s brief argues, ‘would shock the 1.8 million residents of eastern Oklahoma who have universally understood that they reside on land regulated by state government, not by tribes,’” but that “[t]hat shock—finding their community involuntarily transferred to an unfamiliar sovereignty—has been, for half a millennium, the central fact of Native American history.”
• At Law360 (subscription required), Jimmy Hoover reports that some of the justices “have sought in recent days to preserve the court’s reputation as a nonpartisan institution on the heels of one of the most bitter confirmation fights in decades, insisting through interviews and other public appearances that their work will be unaffected by the partisan uproar over Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment.”
• At The WLF Legal Pulse, Samuel Boxerman and Ben Tannen explain that “[t]he jurisdictional reach of the Clean Water Act … finally may be clarified, if the U.S. Supreme Court grants one or more recent cert petitions now before the Court.”
• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin unpacks the issue on which the Supreme Court ordered additional briefing in takings case Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania, which was argued before an eight-member court and will be reargued later this term. 

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