Friday round-up

For USA Today, Richard Wolf reports that even if the Supreme Court agrees to review one of several pending cert petitions that ask the justices to reconsider the doctrine of qualified immunity, “the murky standard of ‘reasonableness’ would remain a hurdle for those claiming police misconduct.” At Education Week, Mark Walsh looks at how changes to the qualified immunity doctrine might affect public school educators.

Briefly:

• Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, that yesterday “federal death-row inmates asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block a lower-court ruling that upheld new federal regulations for carrying out the death penalty.”
• Jordan Rubin reports at Bloomberg Law that Texas death row inmate Billy Joe Wardlow, who “shot and killed an 82-year-old man when he was 18,” is arguing to the Supreme Court that “the fact that his brain was still developing at the time should bar his execution and, by implication, more than 40 others, too.”

• At The Daily Beast, Tim Teeman covers the “Sunday night/Monday morning pins-and-needles anxiety” experienced by LBGTQ advocates “waiting for the Supreme Court to rule” “about whether it is OK to fire someone because they are gay or transgender.”
• At the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice & Comment blog, Susan Morse and Stephen Shay refute the taxpayer’s claim in a pending cert petition, Altera Corp. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, that the case presents “an opportunity to place limits on an inappropriate exercise of administrative agency power.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes instances in which ideologically distant justices have voted together in divided decisions.

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