Tuesday round-up
Yesterday the Court issued additional orders from its November 13 Conference. Perhaps most notably, it denied a request by a New Hampshire anti-abortion group to review a ruling by the First Circuit that upheld the refusal of the Department of Health and Human Services to provide the group with access to documents submitted to the federal government by Planned Parenthood. Lyle Denniston covered the order for this blog, with other coverage coming from NPR’s Nina Totenberg.
Briefly:
- In The Economist, Steven Mazie weighs in on Friday’s announcement that the Court will review a challenge to a Texas law imposing additional regulations on abortion clinics in that state; he suggests that “the constitutional and political stakes are huge: the justices’ decision will arrive on the eve of the final trimester of the presidential campaign. The ruling will amplify concerns about the justices Barack Obama’s successor will appoint to a bench that, a year from now, will be occupied by three octogenarians.”
- At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen has video of Floyd Abrams discussing the Court, the First Amendment, and campaign finance cases.
- In commentary at Forbes, Ilya Shapiro discusses the government’s expected challenge to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling blocking the implementation of its immigration policy and concludes that the Court “is certain to take the case, but the question is when.”
- At PrawfsBlawg, Steve Vladeck urges the Court to review a case that “raises a far more important retroactivity question, one that is already the subject of a 5-3 (and growing) circuit split, one that has an ever-shortening clock, and, most significantly, one that may only be definitively answerable if the Court does something it hasn’t done in 90 years–issue an ‘original’ writ of habeas corpus.”
- At Cato at Liberty, Ilya Shapiro and Randal John Meyer discuss the amicus brief that Cato filed in a challenge to “Colorado renewable-energy regulations” which “require that all energy that enters the state be created in compliance with certain parochial standards” – which, they contend, is “effectively . . . an extraterritorial law, regulating economic activity outside the state and thus violating the Commerce Clause.”
- At the NCSL Blog, Lisa Soronen analyzes the recent summary decision in Mullenix v. Luna, in which the Court ruled that “a police officer should have been granted qualified immunity when he shot at a car whose driver had led police on a high speed chase to stop it instead of waiting to see if spike strips worked.”
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) news article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
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