Wednesday round-up

By Edith Roberts
on Sep 6, 2017 at 7:18 am

At In a Crowded Theater, Erica Goldberg examines the petitioner’s free-speech arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which stems from a baker’s refusal to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple; she concludes that the case will “turn on how much a wedding cake, designed in a custom-tailored way, is a message of acceptance versus an item in the economic marketplace.” At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald argue that “[a]lthough making cakes may not initially appear to be speech to some, it is a form of artistic expression and therefore constitutionally protected.”

Briefly:

• In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “a group of prominent [Republican] politicians filed briefs on Tuesday urging the Supreme Court to rule that extreme political gerrymandering — the drawing of voting districts to give lopsided advantages to the party in power — violates the Constitution.”
• At the Heritage Foundation, Elizabeth Slattery offers an overview of the upcoming Supreme Court term, which “promises to be one for the history books.”

• In a paper available at SSRN, Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle suggest that the majority opinion in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer, which held that a state’s exclusion of a church-run preschool from a government program that offered grants for playground resurfacing violated the free exercise clause, “masks deep division about basic Religion Clause principles.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Trevor Burrus and Meggan Dewitt urge the Supreme Court to summarily reverse a lower-court decision allowing enforcement of a government order requiring removal from the internet of computer-aided design files that could be used to make a 3-D-printed gun, arguing that “[w]hile some people are frightened by the prospect of 3D-printed guns, … that is no reason to allow the government to shut down speech about such guns without ensuring that the restrictions comport with the strictures of the First Amendment.”

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