Friday round-up

By Edith Roberts
on Sep 23, 2016 at 7:42 am

Briefly:

• At Law.com (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that after sending letters to all eight justices asking for details about their current health, he received a single response, from Chief Justice John Roberts, writing on behalf of the entire court, stating only that Mauro “can expect to see an able and energetic Court when we reconvene in October”; “transparency advocates and some court scholars,” Mauro notes, “argue that the justices, increasingly in the public eye and often viewed as political players, don’t deserve as much invisibility as they seem to want.”
• At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston highlights the pending cert. petition in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, a case posing the question of what level of educational benefit constitutes “an ‘appropriate’ education for each disabled child” in the public school system.
• Adam Feldman in Empirical SCOTUS looks for clues as to how the court will fill up its docket next term by considering the cases in which the government has sought cert., noting that the “most likely sources for upcoming grants are the federal government’s filings,” because even “the most successful attorneys on cert do not approach the cert success rates of the Office of the Solicitor General’s (OSG) petitions.”
• In Bloomberg Law, Kimberly Robinson reports that, according to Supreme Court advocates familiar with the court’s business docket, the business cases that the court has agreed to hear next term are “narrow and technical,” because the “high court vacancy has caused the justices to take a ‘wait-and-see’ approach in cases that are ideologically divisive.”
• At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports on a recent denial by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit of en banc review of a ruling that “struck down Amtrak’s power to help write” “standards for passenger and freight trains to compete for use of the same tracks” and “nullified the passenger service’s shared role in settling disputes over those standards”; he evaluates the prospect that the government will seek Supreme Court review in the case.

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