Thursday round-up

AMY HOWE NOV 14, 2013 8:22 AM

Last night the Mount Holly Township Council approved a settlement of the lawsuit brought by a group of residents challenging plans to redevelop the neighborhood where they live.  On December 4, the Court was scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on whether the residents could bring a disparate impact claim under the Fair Housing Act.  Lyle Denniston reported on the settlement for this blog; other coverage comes from Robbie Whelan and Jess Bravin for The Wall Street Journal and Richard Wolf of USA Today. 

Yesterday the Court heard oral argument in Unite Here Local 355 v. Mulhall, in which the Justices are considering whether an agreement between an employer and a union to recognize the union as an exclusive bargaining representative without holding secret ballot-box elections runs afoul of federal laws that prohibit the two from exchanging “thing[s] of value.”  Coverage comes from Nina Totenberg of NPR, Richard Wolf of USA Today, and Jess Bravin and Melanie Trottman of The Wall Street Journal.

On Tuesday the Court heard oral argument in Rosemond v. United States, on the scope of “aiding and abetting” liability under federal law.  Rory Little reported on the argument for this blog; other coverage comes from Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST.

Briefly:

• Writing for this blog, Geoffrey Rapp reports on Tuesday’s oral arguments in Lawson v. FMR LLC, in which the Justices are considering what protections the Sarbanes-Oxley Act provides for whistleblowers.
• In The New York Times, Manny Fernandez reports on oral arguments in the Fifth Circuit in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the continuing challenge to the school’s use of affirmative action in its undergraduate admissions process.
• In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse discusses what she characterizes as  an “underappreciated aspect of the court’s institutional behavior, . . . what one might call the care and feeding of the docket.”
• At Mayer Brown’s Class Defense blog, Brian Netter and Dan Himmelfarb discuss the brief filed by the United States in Fifth Third Bancorp. v. Dudenhoeffer, which they summarize as “ask[ing] the Court to intervene on a different (and highly significant) question: whether ERISA plan fiduciaries are entitled to a presumption that they have acted prudently in permitting plan participants to invest in their own company’s common stock.”

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