Monday round-up

AMY HOWE MAR 31, 2014 7:45 AM

This morning the Court will hear oral arguments in Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank International, in which the Justices will consider whether the Patent Act authorizes patents on software.  Ronald Mann previewed the case for this blog, while on Friday Eric Citron added a post on the federal government’s brief in the case.  Other coverage of the case comes from Timothy Lee of The Washington Post and Richard Wolf of USA Today.  And commentary on the case comes from the editorial board of The New York Times, which urges the Court to “make clear that nobody should be allowed to claim a monopoly over an abstract idea simply by tying it to a computer.”   

Briefly:

• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost discusses several challenges by death row inmates involving lethal injections.  He contends that the Court “may turn these pleas aside  . . . but at a cost to the public’s seeming decision that executions be carried out according to modern views of common humanity.”
• At his Harmless Error blog, Luke Rioux discusses last week’s decision in United States v. Castleman, in which the Court held that Castleman’s state conviction for misdemeanor domestic assault constitutes a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” for purposes of possessing a firearm under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(9).
• At Just Security, Marty Lederman discusses Hussain v. Obama, a petition filed by a Guantanamo detainee that has been relisted three times.

[Disclosure:  Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in Sepulvado v. Jindal, one of the cases discussed in Kenneth Jost’s post.]

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