Wednesday round-up

AMY HOWE JAN 6, 2016 8:58 AM

Next week’s oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the challenge to the requirement that public employees who decline to join the union that represents them nonetheless pay a fee to cover their share of the costs of collective bargaining, continue to garner coverage.  I previewed the case in Plain English for this blog, while Mark Walsh did the same for Education Week. 

Yesterday a group of female lawyers filed an amicus brief in support of the challengers to Texas’s law regulating abortion clinics.  In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports on the brief, which he characterizes as an “extraordinary” one that described the women’s “own abortions and why their reproductive freedom was pivotal to their personal and professional lives.”  And in USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “more than 100 women in the legal profession to an actress, an author and an anthropologist, women from all walks of life signed ‘friend-of-the-court’ briefs intended to humanize what for most members of the high court is an abstract issue.”

Briefly:

• At Balkinization, Marty Lederman has “five quick reactions” to the brief filed by the states in the challenge to the Obama administration’s immigration policy.
• Also at Balkinization, Rick Pildes weighs in on the federal government’s amicus brief in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, describing it as an “explosive” filing that “has inexplicably undermined nearly 70 years of the United States’ legal and political commitment about the status of Puerto Rico and the right of the people there to local self-government.”
• At Notice and Comment, Nicholas Bagley looks back at last month’s oral argument in Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and concludes that, if the Court “harbors doubts about whether the Vermont statute should give way, the right thing to do is to uphold the law—at least until the Labor Department reconsiders its view that the law is perfectly consistent with ERISA.”

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