Monday round-up

Briefly:

• Adam Liptak visits The New York Times’ podcast The Daily to talk about Department of Commerce v. New York, a challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census that is “the biggest case in front of the Supreme Court this session.”
• At CNN, Joan Biskupic reports that “[r]ecent late-night orders, an abrupt dismissal of a case after oral arguments, and long-pending appeals that have fallen into a black hole at the Supreme Court have cast fresh scrutiny on the inner workings of America’s top tribunal.”
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost argues that, in three cases the court granted last week that ask whether federal law protects employees from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender identity, “a ruling to limit Title VII protections for LGBT employees will come, if it does, at the expense of the conservatives’ professed commitment to ‘plain text’ statutory interpretation and respect for precedent.”

• Nicholas Stephanopolous writes at the Election Law Blog that last week’s ruling by a federal court in Michigan “that twenty-seven Michigan state house, state senate, and congressional districts are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders” reveals that “while the Supreme Court continues to debate the issue” in this term’s two partisan-gerrymandering cases, Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, “the lower courts have found a way to identify—and invalidate—extreme gerrymanders.”
• At Sands Anderson, Cullen Seltzer discusses last week’s decision in Lamps Plus Inc. v. Varela, in which the court held that the Federal Arbitration Act bars interpretation of an arbitration agreement under state law that would allow class arbitration based on general language commonly used in arbitration agreements.
• Trialdex explores the potential retroactive effect of a ruling against the government in Rehaif v. United States, in which the court considered last week whether, to convict defendant in U.S. illegally for violating a federal gun-possession law, prosecutors must show that defendant knew he was in the country illegally.

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