Thursday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS SEP 29, 2016 7:33 AM

Coverage of the prospects for the new Supreme Court term that begins next week comes from Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, who previews the court’s “pared-down docket,” assesses the likelihood of court involvement in controversial areas such as transgender rights and immigration, and concludes that to “a large degree, the Supreme Court’s agenda will hinge on the results of the presidential election.” At The Hill, Lydia Wheeler offers another preview of the upcoming term, highlighting “five of the most interesting cases before the court.” Commentary on the court and the election comes from Bill Blum at Truthdig, who discusses some of the cases on the court’s “sparse roster” and warns that “the next president will have the power to reshape the nation’s ultimate judicial body, and with it, the power to redefine the meaning and application of the Constitution, not just for the next four or eight years, but for a generation or more.” In The Conversation, Eric Segall takes issue with the tendency of “most court watchers” to deplore the current eight-member Supreme Court as “an incomplete, divided legal institution,” arguing that “the longer we have an evenly divided court, the more likely it will be the justices will act more modestly, and take more heed of Hamilton’s warning that they exercise ‘judgment’ not ‘will.’”

Briefly:

• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse unpacks the court’s late-summer order denying North Carolina’s emergency request to reinstate its voter ID law and two other election law provisions that a federal appeals court had struck down as intentionally discriminatory, noting that four justices stated in the order that they would have granted the motion and suggesting that “only Justice Scalia’s death has preserved democracy in North Carolina.”
• In Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that the Supreme Court’s truncated argument schedule for October is partly due to observance of the Jewish holidays, noting that it “appears to have taken a ‘critical mass’ of two Jewish justices on the court” – Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer – “to push the court to accommodate the need of observant Jews not to be working on major holidays.”

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