Friday round-up

Briefly:

• At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen explains why he expects the court to announce this afternoon that it will review several redistricting cases from Texas, remarking that “[i]t is shaping up to be a blockbuster term on gerrymandering at the Supreme Court.”
• In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Henry Miller urges the court to review Weyerhaeuser Company v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which he calls the “amphibian equivalent of a shaggy-dog story,” in which “the government is trying to seize control of land it does not own in order to protect an endangered species of frog that does not live there.”
• NFIB contends that the justices should grant a cert petition that asks “whether landowners [bringing takings claims against the federal government] should be allowed a right to jury trial.”
• At Take Care, Leah Litman takes issue with Texas’ amicus brief in support of the federal government in Hargan v. Garza, “the case in which the Trump administration is attempting to impede undocumented young women’s access to abortion by refusing to release the women from its custody so that they can obtain abortions,” allowing that the brief “does, however, have one thing going for it: Texas’s position is a better reflection of how the Office of Refugee Resettlement views these young women—as something less than autonomous human beings.”

• At FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux looks at Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, in which the Supreme Court considered at oral argument this week whether Ohio’s voter-roll-maintenance process violates federal voter-registration laws, noting that “the court challenge highlights the extent to which an individual voter’s ability to cast a ballot could depend on where he or she lives, an increasingly pressing concern as states take divergent approachesto establishing voter eligibility.”
• At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie discusses this week’s arguments in “a pair of cases probing the meaning of the Fourth Amendment’s bar on ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’—both involving vehicle privacy—” Byrd v. United States and Collins v. Virginia.
• At the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, Elizabeth Slattery and Tiffany Bates “talk about cases at the Court this week and a conversation between Justice Thomas and his wife.”
• Subscript offers a graphic explainer for Hall v. Hall, which asks when a judgment dismissing one action is final and appealable when multiple actions were consolidated for all purposes under federal procedural rules.
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Reilly Stephens weigh in on Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, which asks whether a Minnesota law banning political apparel at polling places violates the First Amendment, arguing that a “complete ban on political expression should be met with the most searching judicial inquiry, regardless of the setting.”
• At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern suggests that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinion in a 2015 gerrymandering case “strik[ing] a surreptitious jurisprudential blow against political gerrymanders” “plant[ed] the seeds of a coherent jurisprudence that lower courts could use to strike down political gerrymanders,” and that “[i]f the Supreme Court soon clarifies that extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, as it appears poised to do, Ginsburg will have laid the groundwork.”
• At SSRN, Jeremy Kidd and Ryan Walters update a study that “measure[es] the Scalia-ness of the potential nominees” on the Trump administration’s list of candidates to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court.

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