Tuesday round-up

Briefly:

• At Law.com, Marcia Coyle reports that “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan recently threw her support behind [a] new law clerk hiring plan by saying she will ‘take into account’ in her own hiring whether judges and law schools comply with the new process.”
• At The Federalist, Ilya Shapiro looks at “a series of recent decisions [that] teased out differences between justices Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas,” noting that “[w]hile both are originalists and textualists, with a deep devotion to constitutional text, structure, and history, they sometimes come out differently when the law is unclear,” which “should give pause to anyone who thinks that ‘originalism’ is code for conservative policy results.”
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Andrew Michaels discusses SAS Institute Inc. v. Iancu, in which the court held that when the patent office institutes inter-partes review, it must decide the patentability of all the claims a petitioner has challenged, observing that “[o]f the twelve federal Article III judges to have fully considered and decided th[e] statutory issue, six reached one conclusion, and six reached the opposite conclusion,” and that “[t]his sort of empirical analysis could lead one to suspect that the statute might not be so clear after all.”
• At the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, Kathryn Kovacs explains why, although some justices seemed concerned during the oral argument in Trump v. Hawaii about “second-guessing an order that came from the President himself and that concerned national security,” “[n]either of those factors … should hinder the Court from reviewing the Travel Ban under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
• At the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty blog, Ilya Shapiro and Reilly Stephens urge the court to review California’s “’mandatory mediation and conciliation process’ for agricultural employers,” and to “require unions in California to vindicate their interests in the same manner as unions in the rest of the country: at the bargaining table.”

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