Tuesday round-up

Briefly:

• In analysis for Law360 (subscription or registration required), Ashley Baker discusses the impact of two recent Supreme Court decisions that have produced a “sea change in intellectual property litigation” as well as a “a serious challenge to software patentability” on the issue of exposing confidential trade secrets.
• At the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin (subscription required), Daniel Cotter looks to past precedent in U.S. v. Nixon and the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson to conclude that Chief Justice John Roberts’ role in presiding over the trial of President Donald Trump will likely wrap up this week without fanfare or hurdles for the chief justice.
• At The World and Everything in It (podcast), Mary Reichard and Nick Eicher analyze two developments last month at the court: Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, “a colorful response to federal judges who use injunctions to stall out presidential policies,” in the court’s decision to allow the federal government to enforce its new “public charge” rule while litigation on the rule proceeds, as well as the oral argument on January 22 in the religious-school-funding dispute Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in this case.]
• At Law360, RJ Vogt reports on a frequent – yet currently unsuccessful – effort by two justices to hear criminal appeals: “In at least 27 cases, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have gone out of their way to dissent from their colleagues’ rejection of petitions by ‘career offenders,’ or people serving extra-long sentences due to prior violent crime or drug convictions.”
• At The Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman discusses the prospect that, with the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump still going on, some or all justices may not attend tonight’s State of the Union address. Blackman notes that Chief Justice William Rehnquist “skipped the 1999 address during the impeachment trial” of President Bill Clinton, while “all nine Justices stayed home” during Clinton’s 2000 address.
• At The Hill, Kaelan Deese reports that Jack Phillips, owner of the cakeshop at the center of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, will release a memoir telling his story of the case, which “became known nationally in 2012 after [Phillips] cited religious objections when declining the request of two men who wanted to order a cake for their wedding.”

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