Thursday round-up
on Feb 11, 2016 at 9:19 am
On Tuesday the Court, by a vote of five to four, blocked the Obama administration’s implementation of its “Clean Power Plan.” Additional coverage comes from Tony Mauro of The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required); from Lawrence Hurley of Reuters; and from Robin Bravender of Greenwire (subscription may be required), who looks more broadly at what the Court’s order may mean “for future challenges to major regulations.”
Commentary comes from Michael Wara, who contends at The Stanford Lawyer that the stay “is likely to have significant ramifications both for the U.S. electric power sector and for the Paris Agreement recently concluded by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change”; from Geoffrey Barnes and Danielle Gagliardi, who at frESH review the process that led to the stay; from Kevin Johnson and Thomas Wood, who at Renewable + Law suggest that “there will be at least a year of uncertainty for the many stakeholders — in particular the state agencies tasked with developing CPP compliance plans”; from Seth Jaffe, who at Law & The Environment argues that, no matter how much EPA and DOJ proclaim that this says nothing about the ultimate results on the merits, the CPP is on very shaky ground at this point”; from Karen Harned, who at Fed Soc Blog contends that “it appears the Supreme Court has finally caught on to the Administration’s game and has decided enough is enough”; from Luke Wake, who argues at the NFIB Legal Center Blog that the Clean Power Plan not only raises “serious federalism issues,” but also “controversially invades and displaces the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the police powers of sovereign states”; and from Patrick Parenteau, who at ACSblog argues that the stay “is unprecedented in a number of ways.”
Briefly:
- In Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that a “coin toss this week determined which of the two advocates will argue on Feb. 23 for the respondents in the closely watched patent infringement cases Stryker v. Zimmer and Halo Electronics v. Pulse Electronics.”
- Patrick Gregory of U.S. Law Week reports on proposals to break up the Ninth Circuit and create a new circuit, which rest in part on the Ninth Circuit’s reversal rate at the Supreme Court.
- At the Council of State Governments’ Knowledge Center, Lisa Soronen looks back at last month’s argument in Sturgeon v. Frost, concluding that, although the case “is very narrow and the relevant law is only applicable to Alaska,” it is nonetheless “interesting because it is just one example of the power struggle over state or federal control which the Supreme Court must resolve in many cases big and small.”
- Henry Miller of Forbes urges the Court to grant review in American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, the challenge to the Obama administration’s executive order on the Chesapeake Bay, arguing that the lower court’s decision, “if not reviewed (and reversed), will entrust to EPA the power to control every land use decision in the nation.”
- In his column for The Washington Post, George Will urges the Court to grant review in a case that he describes as involving “a minor economic activity, teeth whitening, but a major principle: Can a state limit Americans’ opportunities by restricting access to particular professions for no reason other than the enrichment of people entrenched in those professions?”
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
