Wednesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JAN 25, 2017 7:01 AM

At Fox News, Bill Mears reports that after meeting with Senate leaders yesterday to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy, President Donald Trump said he would announce his choice next week, and that “the list of possible candidates is now down to three names, all of them federal appeals court judges: Judge William Pryor in Alabama, Judge Neil Gorsuch in Colorado, and Judge Thomas Hardiman in Pennsylvania”; he adds that sources “close to the selection process did not rule out other names being added late in what has emerged as a fast-moving, dynamic process.” At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr also reports that Trump is closing in on a selection, identifying Hardiman and Gorsuch as the top choices and noting that Judge Raymond Kethledge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, along with Pryor, is also in the mix; he observes that “Hardiman, 51, or Gorsuch, 49, would probably offer an easier route to confirmation than Pryor,” and that both Gorsuch and Hardiman “would, in all likelihood, largely track the voting pattern of the late Antonin Scalia.”

Additional coverage of the final stretch of the nomination process comes from Robert Barnes at The Washington Post, Michael Shear and Adam Liptak at The New York Times, and Nina Totenberg at NPR. Commentary on the possibility of a Gorsuch nomination comes from Matthew Monforton at The Resurgent, who cautions that one “subject worth extra scrutiny … is Gorsuch’s view of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,” about which Senate Republicans should be prepared to “grill him” if he is nominated.

Briefly:

• At Prawfsblawg, Richard Re discusses the court’s recent decision in Lightfoot v. Cendant Mortgage Corporation, in which a unanimous court held that Fannie Mae’s charter does not create federal jurisdiction in all cases to which the federal entity is a party, describing the opinion as “a useful illustration of a distinctive way of using and modifying precedent: narrowing,” and noting that the case also raises “the possibility that narrowing jurisdictional precedents might be a special undertaking that ought to be governed by distinctive principles.”
• At The Register, Thomas Claburn looks at Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., a case that tests the scope of the patent-exhaustion doctrine, noting that if “printer maker Lexmark International prevails against ink cartridge reseller Impression Products, tech giants and other American companies will gain the ability to control products through patent claims after they have been sold.”
• In The New York Times, Adam Liptak examines former president Barack Obama’s win rate in cases at the Supreme Court, concluding that although Obama “won a series of major cases … on health care, gay rights, affirmative action and abortion,” over hundreds of cases in eight years, his reception at the court, on the whole, was chilly.”
• At ASU Now, Mary Beth Faller reports on a recent speech by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at which the justice said that “the confirmation process for high-court nominees is essentially useless because the public wants to know how a candidate would rule — something she told a crowd at Arizona State University that no good judge would predict,” and that “instead, lawmakers should consider a candidate’s character.”

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