Tuesday round-up
In The Washington Post, Spencer Hsu reports that “[f]ive protesters who disrupted a session of the U.S. Supreme Court by shouting disapproval of its rulings on campaign finance law were sentenced to one or two weekends in prison Monday after losing a bid to overturn a 1949 law restricting public protest at the court.” Additional coverage comes from Zoe Tillman at BuzzFeed News, who notes that “[a]lthough the sentences were minimal, they sent a message — after a spate of disruptive protests in recent years — that future would-be high-court demonstrators may risk jail by following a similar path.”
Briefly:
- At Madison.com, Matthew deFour identifies “a silver lining” in “2011 and 2012 gubernatorial and Senate recall elections [that] were a complete disaster for Wisconsin Democrats”: “The unearthing of key evidence in a potentially landmark legislative redistricting case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.”
- The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s The Regulatory Review presents a series of essays “commenting on the Court’s most significant regulatory decisions from this past term.”
- In an analytical article for The Washington Post, Sarah Seo discusses the brewing conflict between Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ embrace of civil asset forfeiture and Justice Clarence Thomas’ suggestion “that the civil-forfeiture program is unconstitutional”; she observes that the clash reflects “a major ideological tension in conservatism today, presenting a showdown between law-and-order champions and small-government principles.”
- At Ogletree Deakins’ blog, Ron Chapman and others note that the three consolidated class-action waiver cases that will be argued on the first day of the Supreme Court’s next term “will affect virtually every employer in the United States.”
- A Jones Day white paper reviews the “possible effects on the business community” of 29 cases from October Term 2016 “of particular interest to business and industry.”
- At The Litigation Daily (subscription required), Tony Mauro looks back at “one of the few cases in which the high court has ruled on the pardon power: the 1866 decision in Ex Parte Garland, involving one of the most prolific—and acerbic—advocates before the court: Augustus Garland.”
- In The Atlantic, Matt Barnum considers whether Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, in which the court struck down a state ban on public funding for improvements to a church’s preschool playground, could “pave the way for more charter schools operated by religious groups, including churches,” which “would mark a significant change in several states.”
Remember, we rely exclusively on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
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