Thursday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS DEC 22, 2016 7:21 AM

Linda Greenhouse warns in a column in The New York Times that the extremism of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks suggests that Trump may nominate “one of the most conservative of all federal judges,” William Pryor, to the court; she maintains that a filibuster of the nomination by Senate Democrats “may well succeed,” because the “executive branch selections are so off the wall … that objections to a high profile, lifetime, far-right appointment to the Supreme Court will tap into public sentiment that is now expressed as mere bafflement but soon enough will turn to real unease.” In a Bloomberg View column, Noah Feldman argues that the Senate’s refusal to consider the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court has created “a new norm” in which the “Senate will confirm Supreme Court appointees only if the president and the Senate majority are of the same party.” At PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman assesses “who within or around the Court comes out ahead and who behind in” the Garland nomination “debacle”; in the first category he points to Justice Elena Kagan, who “might have been the intellectual center of a liberal Court,” and he includes Chief Justice John Roberts, who “avoids the prospect of being a Chief regularly in the minority and assigning dissents rather than majority opinions,” in the second.

Briefly:

• For Westlaw Journal Intellectual Property, Patrick Hughes discusses TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Food Brands Group LLC, a case the court agreed last week to hear involving the venue in which patent infringement lawsuits can be filed, noting that “TC Heartland’s objection to Kraft’s venue choice reflects concerns that accused infringers are sometimes disadvantaged by where patent holders file their suits.”
• At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog, Tony Francois highlights Foster v. Vilsack, a pending cert petition involving the Department of Agriculture’s interpretation of what constitutes a protected wetland in which the foundation has asked “the Supreme Court to decide whether low level federal bureaucrats can force the federal courts to accept their interpretation of federal law, merely by testifying to their opinion in an administrative hearing.”
• At CNN, Eugene Scott reports that “ Ted Cruz says the new African-American museum honoring black history has made ‘a mistake’ by not featuring Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”
• In Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro showcases seven recent and upcoming court-related books, observing that “lately, Supreme Court fiction has been rivaling nonfiction for compelling reading and insights into the workings of the nation’s highest court.”

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