Friday round-up

Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that was originally published at Howe on the Court, that yesterday evening the Supreme Court put a hold on district court orders requiring the transfer of prisoners from a federal prison in Ohio where inmates are at risk from COVID-19. At NBC News, Pete Williams reports that “[i]n a brief order signed by Justice Sonia Sotomayor with no noted dissent, the court gave the Trump administration more time to challenge the judge’s order in the lower courts.”

For the Los Angeles Times, David Savage reports that “[a]mid nationwide protests over police killings, the Supreme Court is facing pressure to reconsider the legal immunity that often shields officers from being sued for using excessive force.” For The National Law Journal, Marcia Coyle reports that Justice Sonia “Sotomayor, a former prosecutor and the only former trial judge now on the Supreme Court, has been the court’s most consistent critic of its qualified immunity rulings.” Devin Dwyer reports for ABC News that “[d]uring their private weekly conference [yesterday], the justices … review[ed] petitions in eight different cases involving qualified immunity, which the court established in an attempt to curb gratuitous litigation.”

Briefly:

• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse argues that the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 order rejecting a California church’s request that it block enforcement of restrictions on attendance at religious services “should have been unanimous”; she finds “[t]he recognition that four Supreme Court justices … would have invoked the court’s power to undermine fact-based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination … terrifying.”
• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Josh Blackman predicts the authors of most of the Supreme Court’s remaining decisions this term, assigning the lion’s share of the major cases to Chief Justice John Roberts.

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