Wednesday round-up

AMY HOWE JUN 11, 2014 9:00 AM

Monday’s opinions continue to generate coverage and commentary.  In CTS Corp. v. Waldburger, the Court held that the federal Superfund law does not preempt North Carolina’s statute of repose, which bars state-law tort claims more than ten years after the defendant’s last culpable act.  Greenwire’s Jeremy P. Jacobs reports that, citing the Court’s decision in CTS, the federal government has asked the Eleventh Circuit to reverse a lower-court ruling in favor of veterans and their families who were exposed to contaminated groundwater at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune.  Other commentary on the CTS case comes from Lisa Soronen at the International Municipal Lawyers Association’s Appellate Practice Blog, who suggests that, although “[s]]ome state legislatures may now want to adopt statutes of repose,” “doing so could cut both ways for local governments,” who could be either the alleged contaminator or “trying to recover from a non-government contaminator.”  And at his eponymous blog, Ed Mannino looks at the role of federalism in the Justices’ reasoning.  At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Michael Kagan weighs in on the Court’s decision in the immigration case Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio.  He suggests both that “[t]he important point here is that the judiciary is not the only institution that can overrule the Board of Immigration Appeals” and that “[t]he questions that should [now] be asked . . . are more political than doctrinal.”

Briefly:

• At Lawfare, Steve Vladeck looks at KBR, Inc. v. Metzgar and Kellogg, Brown & Root Services v. Harris, two cases involving civil liability for military contractors in the battlefield that are scheduled for consideration at the Justices’ Conference tomorrow, and outlines why, in his view, the Court should deny review.
• At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re considers the Justices’ end-of-Term efforts to finish up all of their decisions before their summer recess and the possible effects of those efforts on the Court’s decision-making process.
• In a post at the blog of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Lisa Soronen has a brief overview of Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama and Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama, the challenges to the state’s redistricting plan in which the Court will hear oral argument next Term.
• At the National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, Carrie Severino notes the “strange bedfellows” that have filed amicus briefs in next Term’s Holt v. Hobbs, in which the Court will consider a prison policy that bans beards, and argues that the diverse group of amici “shows that freedom of religion has broad support across the political spectrum.”
• At ISCOTUSnow (video), Vinay Harpalani discusses the Court’s decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, upholding Michigan’s ban on the use of affirmative action by public universities in that state.
• In The New Republic, Simon Lazarus discusses the significance of last week’s decision in Bond v. United States, in which the Court held that a Pennsylvania woman cannot be prosecuted in federal court for attempting to poison her husband’s mistress.

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