Wednesday round-up
Yesterday the court removed securities-fraud case Leidos, Inc. v. Indiana Public Retirement System from the November argument calendar. At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr reports that the move came “after the two sides told the justices they are near a settlement,” and that the case had “asked the court to clarify investors’ ability to sue companies for omitting information from shareholder reports.” Additional coverage of the settlement in Leidos comes from Jack Newsham at Law360 (subscription required).
During the break between argument sessions, the justices’ off-the-bench activities are drawing attention. For this blog, Andrew Hamm highlights recent remarks by Justice Elena Kagan at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. Additional coverage comes from Steve Schmadeke for the Chicago Tribune, who reports that “Kagan did not directly address the perception that the court has become increasingly politicized but instead emphasized that more than half of the court’s cases are decided unanimously.” For the Queens Chronicle, Ryan Brady covers a recent appearance by Justice Sonia Sotomayor at Queens College. Michael Ortiz and Jill Leavey report for the Hofstra Chronicle that while in New York, Sotomayor also “had an intimate conversation with Hofstra’s law students about how she made it from the Bronx to the bench.” And for the New York Post, Rebecca Santiago talks to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer about the justice’s famous twice-weekly workouts. For USA Today, Richard Wolf recounts his personal experience with the RBG workout program, which “clearly showed that the justice keeps fit.”
Briefly:
- At ProPublica, Ryan Gabrielson reports that although “[t]he decisions of the Supreme Court, [which] are rich with … legal judgments of great import for all Americans[, …] are also supposed to be entirely accurate,” “a ProPublica review of several dozen cases from recent years uncovered a number of false or wholly unsupported factual claims,” including “an error in a landmark ruling, Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.”
- At The Hill, Lydia Wheeler reports on the efforts of a nonprofit, Fix the Court, to increase transparency at the Supreme Court, including by “leading the charge to get cameras into the Supreme Court’s chambers so that its deliberations can be viewed by all, not just those lucky enough to get a seat in the courtroom.”
- At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that “the Justices on Monday turned down an attempt to head off a major trial of a high-profile terrorism case[,] … mark[ing] the second time within a week that the court chose to bypass a Guantanamo case, and continu[ing] a pattern that has been followed for almost a decade.”
- Subscript provides a graphic explainer for Ayestas v. Davis, in which the court will consider the contours of an indigent defendant’s right to government-funded investigative services in an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel case.
- At FiveThirtyEight, Oliver Roeder points out that “[t]he justices, the most powerful jurists in the land, seem to have a reluctance — even an allergy — to taking math and statistics seriously,” as shown by Chief Justice John Roberts’ recent dismissal of metrics for measuring partisan gerrymandering as “’sociological gobbledygook,’” and wonders whether “this allergy to statistical evidence is really a smoke screen — a convenient way to make a decision based on ideology while couching it in terms of practicality.”
- At Law360 (subscription required), Judge Alex Kozinski reviews a recent book, “The Judge: 26 Macchiavellian Lessons,” by Ronald Collins and David Skover, which presents 26 “technique[s] the crafty judge can use (or avoid) in pursuing power, all illustrated by Supreme Court cases or incidents.”
- At Bloomberg BNA, Kimberly Robinson chronicles reactions in the #SCOTUS Twittersphere to the bumpy performance of the Supreme Court’s new transcription service.
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