Monday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS MAY 13, 2019 7:06 AM

Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post first published at Howe on the Court, that on Friday, “Republican legislators from Ohio and Michigan … asked the Supreme Court to put lower-court rulings that found partisan gerrymandering in those states on hold while they appeal”; the legislators argue that the Supreme Court may decide this term in partisan-gerrymandering cases from North Carolina and Maryland “that partisan gerrymandering claims do not belong in court at all.” At Modern Democracy, Michael Parsons observes that “[i]f the remedial process is dragged out long enough, the [Ohio and Michigan] plaintiffs might miss their chance at relief before the 2020 election even if the Supreme Court affirms in the North Carolina and/or Maryland cases,” and he offers “a few strategic case-management suggestions for district courts looking to provide timelier relief.”

On the eve of publication of his new memoir, “The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years,” retired Justice John Paul Stevens sat down for interviews with several Supreme Court reporters. At NPR, Nina Totenberg talked to Stevens about “the takeaway from the book,” the court’s recent turn to the right, and the justice’s “racket skills,” now most often deployed at table tennis. Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal that “[d]isregard of precedent is one of [Stevens’] top concerns about John Roberts’s court.” For The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that Stevens “expressed generalized distress at the state of the world and the nation’s politics.”

Briefly:

• For The New York Times, Adam Liptak writes that although President Donald Trump’s two Supreme Court appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, “were widely expected to be jurisprudential twins,” “it turns out that there is more than a little daylight between” them.
• At CNN, Joan Biskupic explains that “[w]hat happens in [June Medical Services v. Gee, a pending cert petition challenging a Louisiana law that would require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals,] … could be first in a series of incremental rulings on a path that, in the end, would determine the fate [of] Roe v. Wade.”
• In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, former solicitor general Paul Clement “discusses how each new justice changes the Supreme Court” and “shares his tips for getting the Court to overturn its past cases.”
• In an op-ed at CNN, Elizabeth Wydra writes that “[a]s the Supreme Court strives to finish its work by the end of June[,] deciding on issues from the future of the census to the ability of politicians to draw their own legislative districts[,]” Chief Justice John “Roberts is in danger of losing his battle to keep most Americans from seeing the court he leads as divorced from politics.”
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Richard Pierce argues that in in Thacker v. Tennessee Valley Authority, in which the court held that that the TVA can generally be sued for personal-injury claims and instructed the lower court that the TVA might be entitled to immunity from suit depending on “whether transmission of electricity is a governmental function or a commercial function,” “the Court replaced a legal regime that was easy to implement and that performed well in myriad contexts for decades with a new legal regime that will present major challenges to courts.”

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