Thursday round-up
At Constitution Daily, Lyle Denniston reports that the Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to add a third partisan-gerrymandering case to this term’s docket, declining “to put on a fast track a case testing the constitutionality of a North Carolina congressional districting map that led in 2016 to victory for 10 Republicans and only three Democrats, despite only a slight GOP edge in voting totals statewide.” At Governing, Anne Blythe covers the Supreme Court’s partial grant on Tuesday of a request by North Carolina Republicans to block a decision by a three-judge federal court invalidating voting maps for the state’s General Assembly. At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen comments on both developments, arguing that “the primary lesson to learn from the Court’s refusal to expedite is that the Court continues to believe that voters can wait when it comes to curing redistricting,” and suggesting that “[t]he absence of Justice Gorsuch’s name in the second order is notable,” because it “shows he’s not moving in complete lockstep with Thomas and Alito on these issues.”
Briefly:
- At ESPN, Ryan Rodenberg handicaps the likelihood that a decision in Christie v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a constitutional challenge to the federal ban on sports betting, “could come as early as next month.”
- At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that “[a]s Congress and the White House quarrel over the fate of 690,000 so-called Dreamers, two veteran U.S. Supreme Court advocates are urging the justices to reject the Trump administration’s effort to get them involved now in the related legal fight.”
- For the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Magazine, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy laments that if the court rules in Jesner v. Arab Bank that corporations are not liable under the Alien Tort Statute, we will have “corporations that are empowered to spend in American elections because of Bellotti and Citizens United; corporations that can make religious objections thanks to Hobby Lobby; and … corporations [that] will be able to aid and abet human rights violations abroad with impunity.”
- At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro urges the justices to review a case that challenges the “use of cy pres” – the “diversion of settlement money from the victims to causes chosen by the lawyers in class action settlements” —as a violation of “the due process and free speech rights of class members.”
- At the Biden Forum, Seema Nanda weighs in on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in which the court will consider whether an Illinois law allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers for collective-bargaining activities violates the First Amendment, arguing that “[p]ublic sector unions have been, and continue to be, a critical pathway to the middle class for women and people of color” and that “[a] Supreme Court ruling against unions in the Janus case would make it harder for millions of people to get ahead and stay ahead.”
- At Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle recap some of the justices’ doings during their February break “and look ahead to the marquee case of U.S. v. Microsoft, set for argument February 27.”
- At The Forward, Jane Eisner shares some “thoughts and observations” from her recent conversation with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Washington.
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