Tuesday round-up

AMY HOWE DEC 9, 2014 6:43 AM

Yesterday the Court heard oral arguments in Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, in which it is considering a challenge to a 2008 law which gives Amtrak a significant role in setting performance standards.  Lyle Denniston covered the oral argument for this blog; other coverage comes from Jeremy P. Jacobs of Greenwire, while commentary comes from Bloomberg View’s Noah Feldman and Jonathan Keim at the National Review Online’s Bench Memos.  And at ISCOTUSnow, Edward Lee predicts the winners in both of yesterday’s oral arguments based on the number of questions for the lawyers.

Yesterday Reuters released The Echo Chamber, a comprehensive study of the Supreme Court bar and its effect on the Court’s certiorari docket.  Writing for this blog, Eric Citron interviewed Joan Biskupic of Reuters about the study.

Briefly:

• Law360 (subscription or registration required) covers the recent filing of a cert. petition by a former deputy mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who “asked the Supreme Court to review his conviction on extortion conspiracy charges, arguing there was no way to convict him because there was no ‘overt act’ on which a valid conviction could be based.”
• At Written Description, Saurabh M. Vishnubhakat reports on last Friday’s cert. grant in Commil USA v. Cisco Systems, in which the Court will consider “whether good-faith belief of a patent’s invalidity is a defense to inducing its infringement.”

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