Monday round-up

By Edith Roberts
on Sep 18, 2017 at 7:27 am

The challenge to President Donald Trump’s March executive order on immigration continues to generate headlines. At CNN, Ariane de Vogue reports that although “[t]he Supreme Court is poised to hear oral arguments in the travel ban case early next month,” in Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project, “that doesn’t actually mean justices will ever decide the legality of [the] controversial executive order,” and that “[m]uch depends on what the White House decides to do.” In The Economist, Steven Mazie suggests that “[l]ess than a month before the Supreme Court considers the legality of his executive order barring travel from six overwhelmingly Muslim countries,” Trump’s tweets reacting to a London bombing last week “handed a gift to those challenging the ban.”

Briefly:

• At Reuters, Andrew Chung reports on the upcoming term’s high-profile partisan-gerrymandering case, Gill v. Whitford, noting that the political practice of “manipulating the boundaries of legislative districts to help one party tighten its grip on power” is “nearly as old as the United States,” “and one the Supreme Court has never curbed.”
• In The New York Times, Adam Liptak talks to the baker and the same-sex couple whose dispute over the baker’s refusal to create a cake to celebrate the couple’s wedding constitutes “another battle in the culture wars,” culminating in a high-profile Supreme Court case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
• At Opinio Juris, Heather Cohen looks at Jesner v. Arab Bank PLC, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether corporations can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute for violations of international law, arguing that if the court answers no to that question, “it will be overturning hundreds of years of legal tradition, as well as undermining the chosen words and understanding of the drafters of the Constitution.”

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