Tuesday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS MAR 10, 2020 6:50 AM

Yesterday the court released orders from Friday’s conference, adding one case to its merits docket for next term, Jones v. Mississippi, which asks whether the Constitution requires a sentencing authority to make a finding that a juvenile is permanently incorrigible before imposing a sentence of life without parole. Amy Howe covers the order list for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that “[t]he case, involving a teenager who killed his grandfather, is the latest in a series of cases on the constitutionality of harsh punishments for youths who commit crimes before they turn 18.” Mark Walsh reports for Education Week’s School Law Blog that “state courts of last resort have split on whether the sentencer—either a judge or jury, depending on the state—must find the defendant to be permanently incorrigible before imposing life without parole.”

At Law360 (subscription required), Denise Harle weighs in on June Medical Services v. Russo, a challenge to a Louisiana law regulating abortion, arguing that the interests of the abortion providers who brought suit in the case are “directly at odds” with those of their patients: “Louisiana’s law seeks to protect women from unskilled abortion providers, yet it is abortion providers who are suing to challenge those protections.” The editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes that the outcome of the case “will demonstrate whether the principle of precedent still matters, or if this new court has become just another player in today’s partisan warfare.” At The World and Everything in It (podcast), Mary Reichard breaks down last week’s oral argument.

At the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice & Comment blog, Nicholas Bagley highlights an amicus brief he and Samuel Bray submitted yesterday in Trump v. Pennsylvania “urging the Supreme Court to put a decisive end to the new but all-too-common practice of entering nationwide injunctions in cases challenging government laws or rules.” Bray discusses the brief at Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, noting that “even for those who have been following the debate there may be some new twists.”

Briefly:

• For The New York Times, Adam Liptak discusses a new study by “two law students at Yale show[ing] that routinely granting argument time to the solicitor general is a recent and curious phenomenon,” and asking “the provocative question of whether giving the solicitor general this preferred position makes any sense.”
• In a column for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin (subscription required), Daniel Cotter “address[es] a rebuke by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. [and] a book about the erosion of the Warren Court advancements.”
• At Morning Consult, Richard Hunt argues that in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a constitutional challenge to the structure of the CFPB, “[t]he appropriate and sensible remedy … is for Congress to enact, whether on its own or through a court directive, legislative reforms to create a bipartisan, Senate-confirmed, five-person commission to lead the bureau.”
• At Oracle’s blog, company executive vice president Ken Glueck insists that a close inspection of the amicus briefs filed in support of Google in Google v. Oracle America, a dispute over the copyright status of application programming interfaces, reveals “that Google’s overall support is far weaker than it appears, and the purported controversy is far less pronounced.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]
• In an article available at SSRN, Jayanth Krishnan looks at W.M.V.C. v. Barr, in which the Supreme Court has been asked to resolve a circuit split about the availability of attorney’s fees for lawyers representing asylum-seekers.

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