Thursday round-up
For the Tribune News Service (via Governing), Jessica Wehrman reports on the court’s grant Tuesday in Husted v. A. Phillip Randolph Institute, in which the justices will decide “whether Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted was correct in his decision to cancel the voting registrations of those who had failed to vote during a two-year period.” Additional coverage comes from Robert Barnes in The Washington Post.
In The Economist, Steven Mazie looks at the court’s ruling in Esquivel-Quintana v. Sessions, in which the justices overturned the deportation of a permanent resident originally from Mexico, observing that “between the lines of the 8-0 decision lies an implicit message for the new administration: the courts will not bow down to executive determinations that long-time residents can be deported for the flimsiest of causes.” At The Narrowest Grounds, Asher Steinberg argues that the decision is “of a piece with Bond and Yates, two infamous recent criminal cases in which the Court reached textually impossible results out of discontent with the government’s prosecutorial choices.”
In The Washington Post, Brian Fung breaks down the court’s decision this week in Impression Products, Inc. v Lexmark International, Inc., in which the justices ruled that U.S. and overseas sales of a product extinguish the patentholder’s rights to sue for infringement; he points out that the “case has huge implications for the way we think about technology ownership in America, and your rights as a user.” At The Verge, Adi Robertson notes that the court’s ruling on overseas sales “is potentially a blow not just to Lexmark, but to companies that sell patented drugs or medical devices cheaper abroad than in the US.”
Rory Little has this blog’s analysis of County of Los Angeles v. Mendez, a case stemming from a law-enforcement shooting in which the court ruled 8-0 on Tuesday that the Fourth Amendment does not support the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit’s “provocation rule.” At the International Municipal Lawyers Association’s Appellate Practice Blog, Lisa Soronen observes that “excessive forces cases are difficult for state and local governments to win because they often involve injury or death,” and that to “win one unanimously likely says something about the problematic nature of the legal theory.”
Briefly:
- The Heritage Foundation’s Mass. Ave podcast features a discussion of Supreme Court retirement rumors and an interview of Hans von Spakovsky about recent voting-related cases from North Carolina.
- Constitution Daily looks at Peruta v. California, in which the justices have been asked to decide whether there is a Second Amendment right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense, noting that the cert petition in the case “has been on the Court’s private conference list four times.”
- At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog, Wen Fa urges the court to review a First Amendment challenge to a Minnesota law that “forbids voters from wearing any apparel that a bureaucrat deems ‘political.’”
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that the “latest effort to force the U.S. Supreme Court to allow demonstrations on the court’s marble plaza was dismissed by a Washington federal judge on Wednesday”; the challengers had argued that “the ban on demonstrations at the high court violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act by burdening their religious rights to protest capital punishment with candlelight vigils.”
- At Balkinization, Mark Tushnet cites reports that the “Trump administration will soon ask the Supreme Court to stay the Fourth Circuit’s order upholding the nationwide injunction against the so-called travel ban”; he notes that “the Supreme Court certainly has the power to stay the Fourth Circuit’s decision [modify the underlying injunction] on the Court’s own understanding — or determination — that the government can resume working on the nation-specific [vetting] procedures,” and that “[m]odifying the injunction would … have the advantage of (prospectively) mooting the merits were the Court to hear the case on its usual schedule, because the ninety days needed to develop the new procedures would almost certainly have expired by the time the Court took up the case on the merits.”
- At Credit Slips, John Pottow discusses a pending cert petition that “involves the federal jurisdictional bar to Medicare challenges.”
- At Stanford Law School’s Legal Aggregate blog, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette looks at the court’s decision inTC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, in which the court held that in the patent venue statute, residence refers only to a defendant’s state of incorporation, limiting the locations in which patent cases can be filed, maintaining that “what was really at issue” in the case “was the ability of patent plaintiffs to forum shop, and the resulting concentration of patent cases in the Eastern District of Texas, which received 40% of all patent cases filed in 2015 or 2016.”
- Advice and Consent (podcast) features a discussion of whether Republicans will suffer any political consequences from the Supreme Court confirmation battle.
- In the Boston Herald, Kimberly Atkins reports on this week’s case of mistaken identity, in which the Supreme Court revealed that it had initiated disbarment proceedings against the wrong attorney, noting that if “you live in New England and have an Irish name, chances are someone else has it, too,” and that “even the nation’s highest court can make a mistake.”
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