Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS APR 17, 2017 7:04 AM

As they kick off the last session of October Term 2016, the justices will hear oral arguments in three cases today. First up is Perry v. Merit Systems Protection Board, in which the court will consider the proper form for civil service review in mixed cases. Howard Wasserman previewed the case for this blog. Dara Brown and Jaeeun Shin also provide a preview for Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute. The second case of the day is Town of Chester v. Laroe Estates, Inc., which asks whether intervenors in a lawsuit must have standing. This blog’s preview came from Howard Wasserman. Taneil George and Nicholas Velonis preview the case for Cornell.

After a lunch break, the justices will reconvene to hear argument in California Public Employees’ Retirement System v. ANZ Securities, Inc., which involves the rules for timely filing of securities class actions. Ronald Mann previewed the case for this blog. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.] Cornell’s preview comes from Anna Marienko and Michele Korkhov. The George Washington Law Review previews all the cases on the April argument calendar.

Last Friday, the court asked the parties in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, a constitutional challenge to Missouri’s exclusion of a church-run preschool from a state program that provides grants to nonprofits, to file letter briefs explaining how the Missouri governor’s recent announcement that the state has changed its policy and will now allow similar grants to religious groups affects the case. Amy Howe reports on the development for this blog. Additional coverage comes from Lyle Denniston at his eponymous blog, who notes that “the court could conclude that the case no longer presents a live controversy under Article III,” and from Mark Walsh at Education Week, who reports that the “justices could decide to scrap the case as moot or could proceed with the arguments, during which they could give further consideration of the governor’s action before moving to the merits.”

Briefly:

• In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports on legal challenges to an attempt by Arkansas to execute seven death-row inmates within 11 days “because the shelf life of the state’s supply of the sedative expires at the end of the month,” noting that an effort by lawyers for the inmates “to seek Supreme Court reconsideration was moved off the justices’ private conference Thursday, which means it won’t be considered until execution dates for four of the prisoners have passed.”
• At Vox, Ezra Klein proposes limiting Supreme Court“justices to a 10-year, nonrenewable term,” which “would lower the stakes of any individual Supreme Court nomination as well as make the timing of fights more predictable,” as “a step toward repairing and normalizing a process that is now dangerously broken and infuriatingly random.”
• The Employment Law Group’s Whistleblower Law Blog looks at Kokesh v. Securities and Exchange Commission, a case to be argued tomorrow that asks whether a federal statute of limitations on civil penalties and forfeitures applies to disgorgements, warning that a ruling against the SEC could “make it harder to maintain a pool of award money that’s been available to whistleblowers since the Dodd-Frank Act was implemented in 2011.”

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