Thursday round-up

The latest episode of Bloomberg Law’s Cases and Controversies podcast “highlights an issue that’s been piling up on the high court’s docket: Qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that serves to shield law enforcement from liability even in the face of the most egregious allegations of civil rights violations.” At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern notes the “emerging, cross-ideological consensus that the court’s jurisprudence here has spiraled out of control,” and he hopes the court will grant one of the 10 pending cert petitions “urg[ing] SCOTUS to reevaluate its qualified immunity precedent.”

Briefly:

• At the Arizona Republic (via How Appealing), Daniel Gonzales reports that “[n]early 650,000 undocumented ‘Dreamers’ are awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court that will determine whether they will be allowed to continue to receive temporary protection from deportation and work permits under an Obama-era program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that President Donald Trump wants to end.”
• At The Hill, John Kruzel covers “[s]peculation over a possible vacancy” on the Supreme Court, which “has focused in recent years on the prospect of Justice Clarence Thomasexiting while Republicans control the White House and Senate, and alternatively on the health of the court’s aging liberal bloc.”
• In an op-ed at the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Daniel Cotter looks at the recent decision in Opati v. Sudan, which held that the current version of the terrorism exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act allows punitive damages for preenactment conduct,” and “a fascinating book on women on the court.”
• At Vox, Ian Millhiser writes that “[a] California church asked the Supreme Court over Memorial Day weekend for an exemption to the state’s stay-at-home order, claiming that the order violates the Constitution when applied to places of worship”; “even a temporary emergency order would have sweeping national implications: It would be a clear signal that the Supreme Court … intends to expand ‘religious liberty’ rights, even potentially at the expense of public health.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes “the content of the arguments and at the words spoken” during the court’s unusual May sitting.

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