Thursday round-up

Supreme Court-related coverage on Wednesday focused on President Donald Trump’s announcement of 20 new additions to his list of potential nominees to the high court. In a story for SCOTUSblog (first published at Howe on the Court), Amy Howe explains the four different iterations of Trump’s list over the last four years and looks at some of the surprising new additions. In other coverage of the list, Adam Liptak of the New York Times notes that it “was issued although there is no current vacancy, suggesting that the move had at least partly political aims.” Andrew Restuccia and Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal report that releasing potential nominees “is a strategy Mr. Trump first deployed during the 2016 campaign and is credited with boosting his support among conservatives.” The Wall Street Journal also has short bios of all 20 new additions to the list. Joan Biskupic of CNN comments that Trump’s list “reflects his us-versus-them approach to judges.” Josh Blackman of the Volokh Conspiracy offers “two cheers” for the list and endorses many of the new names but concludes that the list ultimately “does not make a difference” because, if Trump wants to nominate someone who is not on the current list, “he will simply put out a new list.”

Briefly:

• In the newest episode of the Legal Docket podcast, Mary Reichard and Jenny Rough break down Hernandez v. Mesa, the court’s February 2020 decision finding no Bivens remedy for the parents of a Mexican teenager who was killed by U.S. Border Patrol agents in a cross-border shooting.
• In an op-ed in the Deseret News, Jay Evensen examines the pending cert petition in Dalberiste v. GLE Associates. The petition urges the justices to reconsider the 1977 decision in Trans World Airlines Inc. v. Hardison, which held that, under Title VII, an employer need not accommodate workers’ religious practices if doing so would impose more than a “de minimis” burden on the employer. “That blatant attack on the First Amendment’s right to freely exercise religion may be going away soon,” Evensen writes, because in Dalberiste the justices have the chance to “return Title VII to its original meaning.”

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