Tuesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS JUL 18, 2017 7:29 AM

At Education Week’s School Law Blog, Mark Walsh reports that when Justice Neil Gorsuch filled in yesterday for Justice Anthony Kennedy at the annual conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, Gorsuch “joined the list of his colleagues—both current and retired justices—who have taken up the cause of improving civics education.” At the Associated Press, Sudhin Thanawala reports that Gorsuch “couldn’t escape discussion of the president’s travel ban — and even the president” at the conference, “where a student essay winner compared the ban to Japanese internment and the producer of the musical ‘Hamilton’ said the cast was scared following Trump’s election victory.”

In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “[g]ay rights groups hope to score one more victory” before Justice Anthony Kennedy leaves the court, and that the “goal this time is nationwide protection against employment discrimination.” In The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that a Supreme Court ruling at the end of last term has engendered speculation about whether “Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. [has] embraced the court’s same-sex marriage decision that he so passionately protested two years ago.” At the New Civil Rights Movement, David Badash discusses a cert petition filed on behalf of “a Washington state florist who refused to … provide a floral arrangement for a same-sex couple’s wedding.”

Briefly:

• At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser weighs in on the dispute over the government’s restrictive interpretation of the Supreme Court’s order partially reinstating the administration’s entry ban, maintaining that although “it is not impossible that the justices will find some new way to delay a real reckoning on the Muslim ban, it will grow increasingly hard for them to do so,” and that “[w]hatever they say in their next order, they now know that the Trump administration will interpret it in the narrowest way possible.”
• In an op-ed in the Santa Fe New Mexican, Kevin Theriot urges the court to review a lower-court decision that banned the display of a privately funded Ten Commandments monument on public property in Bloomfield, N.M., warning that “[w]e have already seen the rising danger to free speech played out — sometimes with violence — on university campuses across the country.”
• At the Freedom Foundation’s Liberty Live blog, Ray Nhan argues that the Supreme Court should grant cert in a case challenging public-sector-union “agency fees” and decide whether“requirements that employees opt-out of union membership [are] unconstitutional.”
• At The National Law Journal, Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle report on recent remarks by Justice Elena Kagan about the events leading up to Kagan’s nomination as solicitor general in 2009.

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