Monday round-up
For USA Today, Richard Wolf and Gregory Korte report that “President Trump added five names Friday to his list of potential Supreme Court justices.” Additional coverage comes from Kevin Liptak and Ariane de Vogue at CNN, Louise Radnofsky for The Wall Street Journal, Dave Boyer at The Washington Times, James Oliphant and Andrew Chung at Reuters, Michael Shear for The New York Times, and Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, who reports that the additions “bring Trump’s list of prospective nominees to 25 as the White House prepares for a possible Supreme Court departure next year.” At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro maintains that the “stellar additions to the existing list of Supreme Court potentials … show that the administration’s judicial-nominations team continues to be serious about picking people who are widely respected for their intellectual rigor and commitment to the rule of law.”
At Politico, Josh Gerstein reports that in remarks at the Federalist Society’s annual conference last week, Justice Neil Gorsuch “vowed to continue to expound the group’s favored judicial philosophies from his new post.” Additional coverage of Gorsuch’s speech comes from Ariane de Vogue at CNN and Robert Barnes for The Washington Post.
Briefly:
- At Reuters, Lawrence Hurley and Dustin Volz report that as the “Supreme Court is set to consider a major cellphone privacy case later this month,” Carpenter v. United States, which asks whether the government must obtain a warrant for cell-site-location information, “leading players in the wireless industry that is at the center of the closely watched dispute are keeping their distance.”
- In a new episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates “discuss recent grants, the Court’s debut into the digital age, and Justice Kagan’s recusal in a case that’s already been argued.”
- At Keen News Service, Lisa Keen looks at the briefs in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court will decide whether the First Amendment bars Colorado from requiring a baker to create a cake for a same-sex wedding.
- At Legal Sports Report, Dustin Golker surveys the reply briefs in Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a constitutional challenge to the federal ban on sports betting.
- NFIB weighs in on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in which the court will consider whetheran Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment, arguing that “everything public employee unions do is inherently political—which is all the more reason to allow non-consenting employees to opt-out of lending financial support.”
- At National Review, Carrie Severino calls Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, a challenge to the constitutionality of inter partes review, a process used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to determine the validity of existing patents, potentially “this term’s sleeper blockbuster … that has major implications for constitutional due process guarantees and protecting private property.”
- At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley reports that Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., may owe his escape from conviction on federal corruption charges to “the narrow view of corruption” the Supreme Court enunciated recently in the case “of another high profile politician, former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican whose conviction on federal corruption charges reached the Supreme Court in 2016.”
- At the National Association of Attorneys General, Dan Schweitzer assesses “who has … been arguing for the states in the Supreme Court” by reviewing “the oral arguments presented by states in the three and a half most recent Supreme Court Terms and the oral arguments presented in the 2005 to 2007 Terms,” concluding that the results “confirm the increasing prominence of state solicitors general.”
- A Daily Journal podcast features discussions of Patchak v. Zinke, in which the justices considered the separation-of-powers limits on Congress’ ability to direct the outcome of litigation during the November argument session, and National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a First Amendment challenge by crisis-pregnancy centers to a California law requiring disclosures about the availability of publicly funded family-planning services.
- For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that after switching sides to now assert that “some federal prisoners serving longer prison terms than the law allowed [are not] entitled to challenge their sentences in court,” the Justice Department “urged the Supreme Court to deny review in McCarthan v. Collins, a cert petition in a case “that would test whether the government’s new position is correct.”
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