Friday round-up
on Jan 8, 2021 at 9:40 am
After a winter recess, the justices meet Friday for a private conference at which they will consider cert petitions asking them to take up new cases this term. Numerous high-profile cases are slated for consideration.
Some are petitions that the justices have considered at prior conferences and are continuing to review (a status indicating that the court is seriously thinking about taking up the case). These relists include petitions about sentencing reform for crimes involving crack cocaine, unequal treatment of Puerto Rico in a federal safety-net program, and President Donald Trump’s practice of blocking his critics on Twitter. Other petitions are scheduled for consideration at Friday’s conference for the first time. Some of the notable ones include petitions about Trump and the emoluments clause, a Mississippi law that bans nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a federal regulation that bars certain family-planning programs from providing abortion referrals, a federal regulation that toughens the assessment of whether legal immigrants are likely to depend on government assistance, and the death penalty for one of the Boston Marathon bombers. For a list of all the petitions we’re watching, click here.
Here’s a round-up of Supreme Court-related news and commentary from around the web:
- Supreme Court Rejects Gohmert Bid to Reverse Trump’s Defeat (Greg Stohr, Bloomberg)
- U.S. Supreme Court’s Breyer in retirement spotlight after Democratic wins (Lawrence Hurley, Reuters)
- New delay in census process probably ends Trump’s plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from apportionment (Brittany Renee Mayes & Tara Bahrampour, The Washington Post)
- Covering SCOTUS and more — Lasnik and Liptak in dialogue (Ronald K. L. Collins, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education)
We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up. If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion, please send it to roundup@scotusblog.com. Thank you!
