Wednesday round-up
Briefly:
- In her eponymous blog, Amy Howe reports that the Virginia transgender student who identifies as a boy and wants to use the boys’ bathroom at his high school filed a brief last week opposing the school board’s cert. petition in the case, Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.; she notes that the brief was filed well in advance of the deadline and that the “early filing means that the Justices will consider the case at their private conference on October 14.”
- At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley reports that the “[s]horthanded and ideologically divided” Court “has yet to take up any cases on politically sensitive social issues in its new term starting in October, instead showing a keen interest in more technical cases of importance to business such as disputes over intellectual property.”
- Coverage of the recent reenactment in Philadelphia of a 1794 Supreme Court case, Georgia v. Brailsford, over which three Supreme Court Justices presided, comes from Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, who reports that the case featured “issues still debated today: the relationship between the state and federal governments, the significance of international law, and the powers of the jury.”
- In a column for Bloomberg View, Noah Feldman argues that if Hillary Clinton wins in November and the Democrats regain control of the Senate, Judge Merrick Garland is unlikely to be confirmed in a lame-duck session, because “Republican senators wouldn’t want the final act of their majority session to be acquiescence to the judicial candidate nominated by President Barack Obama.”
- Brianne Gorod, contributing to a symposium in Democracy, maintains that the future composition of the Court should be a hot-button election issue, noting that after “decades with a solidly conservative majority . . , the Court could be on the verge of having a majority of progressive Justices for the first time since the early 1970s,” and that “the potential consequences of such a shift are significant” in such areas as voting rights, campaign finance, and access to the courts.
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