Wednesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS MAY 8, 2019 6:45 AM

At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern maintains that in recent decisions striking down partisan gerrymanders in several states, federal “courts have called SCOTUS’s bluff[:] They’ve shown the justices exactly why partisan gerrymandering infringes on the Constitution, and how it can be remedied.” At the Election Law Blog, Nicholas Stephanopolous argues that “[n]ow that courts have invalidated congressional districts in Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, there are very few remaining plans that could successfully be challenged,” so “[i]f the Court permitted partisan gerrymandering claims to proceed” in this term’s two partisan-gerrymandering cases, Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, “the ensuing volume of litigation would … be more like a trickle than a flood.”

Briefly:

• For The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin reports that in his first public remarks since joining the Supreme Court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh told a judicial conference on Monday night “that advancing technology would force not only a re-examination of free-speech and privacy rights, but also of war powers as international conflict expands across the internet.”
• Jacqueline Thomsen reports for The Hill that “[t]he FBI on Monday released more than 500 pages of heavily redacted tips from the public surrounding the nomination of … Kavanaugh last year.”
• At SCOTUS OA, Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag analyze participation by advocates in Supreme Court arguments this term, concluding that “the Supreme Court Bar is still largely a ‘boys club’”: “[W]omen account for 17.7% of Supreme Court advocates in OT2018,”  and “when they do get a chance to appear, they are not given as much chance to actually speak.”

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