Friday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JUL 7, 2017 7:31 AM

At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that “[a] federal judge in Hawaii ruled on Thursday afternoon that he has no power to cut back on the scope of the Supreme Court order last week allowing the Trump Administration to enforce, in part, its new restrictions on immigration of foreign nationals and refugees.” Additional coverage comes from Matt Zapotosky in The Washington Post. At Just Security, Marty Lederman compiles briefing in and commentary on the case. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Adam Chilton and Genevieve Lakier argue that if the justices decide to weigh in on the constitutional questions posed by the travel-ban cases, they “should take this opportunity to squarely reject the plenary power doctrine” – which “gives the president and Congress extraordinary power to take action when it comes to immigration law” — “as both outdated and unnecessary.” David Boyle weighs in on the court’s first opinion in the travel-ban case at Casetext.

At Stanford Law School’s Legal Aggregate blog, James Sonne looks at Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, in which the court ruled that a state cannot deny a church a public benefit – here, funds to resurface a playground — because of the church’s religious status; he maintains that “the Court’s general consensus against exclusions based on religious identity may … serve as a helpful framework in this area of law which often seems irreconcilably divided.” In an op-ed for The Boston Globe, Erik Fehrnstrom calls the decision “a victory for liberty,” asserting that “the real debate here is not about playground resurfacing; it’s about school choice and whether parents have the right to expect their tax dollars to follow their children into religiously affiliated education settings.”

Briefly:

• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman evaluates the track records of recent “’first-timers’ at oral arguments.”
• The Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast features a discussion with Wall Street Journal Supreme Court reporter Jess Bravin.
• At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern assesses the implications for same-sex marriage of a retirement by Justice Anthony Kennedy, arguing that “[i]f Kennedy retires, the future of same-sex marriage will rest in the hands of a man who vehemently opposes gay rights,” and that “nobody should count on the chief justice to uphold a decision he hates.”
• Also at Slate, Jessica Brand argues that Turner v. United States, in which the court upheld the convictions of the defendants in a murder trial against a claim that the prosecutors had failed to disclose exculpatory evidence, “suggests that, as long as prosecutors promise to do better, the Supreme Court is willing to give them a free pass.”

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