Thursday round-up

In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Brianna Cea and Thomas Wolf weigh in on Department of Commerce v. New York, a challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, arguing that, contrary to the administration’s assertion, “[n]ever in the census’ 230-year history has the decennial questionnaire asked for the citizenship status of everyone in the country.” In the latest episode of Bloomberg Law’s Cases and Controversies podcast, “Kimberly Robinson and Jordan Rubin get you up to speed on the … case and discuss, among other things, whether it will turn into a ‘Travel Ban, Part Two.’”

Briefly:

• Patrick Gregory and Kimberly Robinson report at Bloomberg Law that “Justice Neil Gorsuch has delivered almost precisely what conservatives were hoping for over his two years on the U.S. Supreme Court, even though his principles occasionally take him in other directions.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Jay Schweikert calls for the court to reexamine its doctrine of qualified immunity – “an atextual, ahistorical doctrine invented by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, which shields government agents from liability for misconduct – even when they break the law” — by reviewing B. and Doe v. Woodard, which involves a strip-search of a preschool child by a state caseworker.

• At Rewire.News, Jessica Mason Pieklo observes that “[a]bortion rights will be back before the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, when the justices will consider reviewing a lower court decision that blocked an Alabama ban on the most common method for second-trimester abortions.”
• In The World and Everything in It (podcast), Mary Reichard breaks down the oral arguments in two administrative law cases involving judicial deference to agency interpretations of statutes and regulations, PDR Network, LLC v. Carlton & Harris Chiropractic Inc. and Kisor v. Wilkie, as well as in maritime law case The Dutra Group v. Batterton.
• In an op-ed for Newsweek, Richard Saenz urges the justices to review the case of Charles Rhines, who argues that “the jury chose to sentence him to death because he is gay.”
• In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Hugh Hewitt writes that as he read Evan Thomas’ new biography of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “I grew to admire O’Connor more even as my qualms about her jurisprudence increased.”
• At the Brennan Center for Justice, Andrew Cohen maintains that “[w]hat Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the Court’s conservatives are saying” in Bucklew v. Precythe, in which the court rejected a death-row inmate’s argument that, because he suffers from a rare medical condition, executing him by lethal injection would violate the constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, “is that murderers may, by law, be treated by the government in the moment of their death the way those murderers treated their own victims.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in this case.]
• At The National Law Review, Jana Slavina Farmer discusses the court’s opinions in two copyright cases this term, Rimini Street Inc. v. Oracle USA Inc. and Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, “both of which concern narrow issues of statutory interpretation.”

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