Tuesday round-up
on Feb 7, 2017 at 7:18 am
Coverage continues of the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that Gorsuch signed on to a letter written by a group of lawyers who objected to “leaks by former U.S. Supreme Court law clerks who gave Vanity Fair magazine behind-the-scenes information about the court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 ruling that led to George W. Bush’s presidency,” signaling “his embrace of the court’s tradition of secrecy regarding internal deliberations—especially when it comes to law clerks.” At NPR, Nina Totenberg compares Gorsuch’s “originalist” views to the “pragmatism” of one of Gorsuch’s mentors, Justice Byron White.
Additional coverage and commentary focus on Gorsuch’s record in various areas of the law. In Business Insider, Allan Smith reports that Gorsuch “is widely expected to favor big business should he be confirmed by the Senate,” although “how he would rule on several major business issues almost certain to hit the court within the next few years is not fully known.” In Wired, Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz look at how the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s possible replacement by Gorsuch may affect the Supreme Court’s approach to technological issues, noting that when Gorsuch has been “faced with questions about faulty police databases and efforts to interdict child pornography in cyberspace, he has displayed a sensitivity to the underlying technology that suggests he may be more interested in these matters than Scalia.”
In The National Law Review, Jason Zuckerman weighs in on Gorsuch’s dissent in a recent whistleblower-protection case, arguing that the judge’s “alleged strict textualism appears to be a cloak for his policy preferences, including his apparent disdain for worker protection laws.” At his eponymous blog, William Goren looks at Gorsuch’s record in disability cases. At the Brennan Center for Justice, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy focuses on Gorsuch’s campaign finance jurisprudence, concluding that although “the good news is Gorsuch can navigate his way through a tangle of precedent—a basic qualification for a jurist,” the “bad news is he may harbor antipathy to regulating money in politics.”
Slate’s Amicus podcast features a discussion of “Gorsuch’s judicial record, whether he really is Scalia 2.0, and the difficult choices confronting Senate Democrats in the wake of this nomination.” At Hosts of Error, Will Rosenzweig weighs in on the Democrats’ choices during the upcoming confirmation hearings, arguing that “the GOP’s consistent assault on the independence and neutrality of the judiciary has reached such disquieting levels that no decision Democrats make will … ‘help restore confidence in the rule of law.’”
Briefly:
- At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog, J. David Breemer discusses Murr v. Wisconsin, in which the court will decide what constitutes the “parcel as a whole” for the purpose of takings analysis and which the justices have scheduled for argument on March 20, arguing that when “the government denies all use of a separately divided and taxed parcel of land, it is accountable to compensate for its actions against that parcel,” and that the “property owner’s other holdings are irrelevant to that duty.”
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