Tuesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS FEB 6, 2018 7:17 AM

Yesterday Justice Samuel Alito denied requests by Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers and voters to put a hold on a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that struck down Pennsylvania’s congressional district lines as a partisan gerrymander in violation of the state constitution and ordered lawmakers to draw new maps. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “[t]he Supreme Court’s order was expected, as the Pennsylvania court had based its decision solely on the state constitution,” and “[o]n matters of state law, the judgments of state supreme courts are typically final.” Additional coverage comes from Robert Barnes for The Washington Post, Ariane de Vogue and Eric Bradner at CNN, Alex Swoyer for The Washington Times, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Joseph Ax at Reuters, Lydia Wheeler and others at The Hill, Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed News, Sam Levine at HuffPost, and Brent Kendall for The Wall Street Journal, who reports that “[n]ew boundary lines could provide Democrats with more winnable districts in Pennsylvania.” Commentary comes from Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress. For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that “[t]he high court’s greater impact could come in the next few months with rulings on partisan maps drawn by Republicans in Wisconsin and Democrats in Maryland.”

Briefly:

• At The World and Everything in It, Mary Reichard discusses the oral arguments in two Fourth Amendment cases involving searches and motor vehicles, Collins v. Virginia and Byrd v. United States.
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Aaron Barnes urge the court to review a Fourth Amendment challenge to several “’pen/trap’ orders authorizing law enforcement to collect IP … addresses for any internet traffic going to or from [a suspect’s] wireless router and other electronic devices,” “under a statutory ‘relevance’ standard that falls well short of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for probable cause,” and to “firmly establish that the internet doesn’t constitute some sort of Constitution-free zone.”

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