Thursday round-up

Briefly:

• At CNBC, Tucker Higgins reports that “Justice Brett Kavanaugh has only been on the bench for two months, but a controversial decision announced this week has abortion opponents starting to worry that he may not be the ally on the high court that they expected.”
• Lyle Denniston reports at Constitution Daily that “[a] group of Maryland Republican voters, claiming that they were penalized for supporting their party’s candidates in the polling booth, asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to make a sweeping review of the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering, and to do so before next summer,” “call[ing] for back-to-back hearings, on the same day, in their case and in a similar pending case from North Carolina.”
• At Law360, Edward Zelinsky writes that the justices’ comments during oral argument in Dawson v. Steager “suggest that they are grappling with how broadly they should rule as they invalidate West Virginia’s tax scheme which taxes the pensions of federal retirees but exempts from income taxation the retirement payments of certain state retirees.”
• At Greenwire (subscription required), Ellen Gilmer reports that “[t]he lead players of several landmark Clean Water Act scuffles are urging the Supreme Court to take up a new case involving the scope of the law,” filing an amicus brief in support “of a Montana landowner criminally prosecuted for digging ponds and diverting a creek on private property and national forestland.”

• At Justia’s Verdict blog, Michael Dorf considers the non-implications of the oral argument in Gamble v. United States, which involves an exception to the double jeopardy clause that allows a defendant to be prosecuted for the same crime in both federal and state court, for state-court prosecutions of potential recipients of presidential pardons; in an accompanying essay on his eponymous blog, he discusses the relation between originalism and stare decisis as invoked by Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the Gamble 
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter weighs in on Apple v. Pepper, in which the justices will decide whether iPhone-app purchasers can bring an antitrust suit against Apple, arguing that “America is grappling with serious questions about the levels of concentration and competition in our economy, and the Supreme Court should reinforce rather than constrict the ability of consumers to seek justice for illegal abuses of market power.”
• At Florida Court Review, John Cavaliere looks at the cert petition and stay application filed by Florida inmate Jose Antonio Jimenez, who is scheduled to be executed today and is challenging Florida’s three-drug lethal injection protocol.

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