Monday round-up
on Dec 31, 2018 at 6:46 am
Briefly:
- At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie notes that “[i]t has been a fairly quiet few months at the Supreme Court,” but “that may change as 2019 begins”: “The justices have already accepted three high-profile cases to be heard in the spring,” and their “next private conference on January 4th could include a range of hot-button cases that would shove the court further into the limelight.”
- At the Constitutional Law Prof Blog, Ruthann Robson writes that “[g]iven the renewed concerns regarding the impartiality of the Court … , it might be time for Chief Justice Roberts to reconsider his position” that extending the judicial code of conduct to Supreme Court justices would be unconstitutional, “[a]nd it will be interesting to see if Roberts addresses ethics in his 2018 year end report.”
- At Politico Magazine, Nelson Cunningham looks at the “mysterious grand jury subpoena case,” believed to be related to the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into interference in the 2016 election, in which the Supreme Court has been asked to block a subpoena issued to a foreign corporation.
- At Reason, Walter Olson urges the court to rule in Air and Liquid Systems Corp. v. Devries that companies can’t be held liable under maritime law for injuries caused by asbestos that was added to the companies’ products by third parties after the point of sale, arguing that “[u]npredictable liability drives up the cost of government contracting and, to the extent it falls on shipbuilding, the cost of navigation, another concern of maritime law.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondent in this case.]
- At the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse blog, Joe Hollingsworth and Katharine Latimer weigh in on Home Depot U.S.A. Inc. v. Jackson, arguing that “the [lower court’s] Home Depot decision and its ilk improperly deny an entire sub-category of defendants protection from abusive state court class actions.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
- In an op-ed for Fox News on The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, a challenge to the placement on public land of a World War I memorial shaped like a cross, Gary McCaleb, a former wildland firefighter, implores “atheists and courts [to] let us honor our fallen as we will,” maintaining that “[n]o reasonable person would mistake the purpose of those crosses, and no legal principle should justify toppling them one by one.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in this case.]
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