Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS FEB 5, 2018 7:33 AM

With the 2018 elections and the 2020 census approaching, gerrymandering cases have been cropping up regularly at the Supreme Court this term. For The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that although “[o]pponents of gerrymandering have won a historic string of victories in the courts recently,” “millions of voters will cast their ballots this fall in districts that judges have declared to be unconstitutional,” because “the justices have routinely told states found to be offenders that they do not have to immediately redraw the maps.” For The Wall Street Journal, Brent Kendall and Scott Calvert report that “[t]he Supreme Court is facing a sensitive choice on whether to intervene in a partisan battle over Pennsylvania’s congressional map,” noting that “[t]he state court based its ruling on the Pennsylvania Constitution, a move that would normally leave the U.S. Supreme Court with little room to intervene.”

Briefly:

• At his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel discusses a cert petition that “raises the issue of whether the Federal Arbitration Act’s Section 1 exemption, which applies on its face only to ‘contracts of employment,’ is inapplicable to independent contractor agreements.”
• At National Review, Reilly Stephens questions the proposition that Justice Anthony Kennedy “is more or less the last rivet keeping the wings on our political 747 attached.”
• For the Miami Herald, Monique Madan reports that a “middle school teacher has filed a lawsuit against Homestead[, Florida,] and its mayor after he says he was unconstitutionally kicked out and banned from city hall,” raising First Amendment issues similar to those presented by Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, Florida, in which the justices will decide whether the existence of probable cause defeats a retaliatory-arrest claim.

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