Monday round-up

Last week the justices released their annual financial disclosure reports; Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. At The Daily Caller, Kevin Daley reports that the disclosures reflect that “[s]tock-holding justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are continuing a gradual sell-off of their shares.”

For the Tribune News Service (via Governing), Erin Golden reports that in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, the court last week “struck down a Minnesota law that prohibits people from wearing political clothing or buttons at polling places, calling the ban overly broad but leaving room for the state to impose narrower restrictions.” In an op-ed for The Hill, Wen Fa hails the decision as “a strike against laws giving government officials too much discretion to censor viewpoints they don’t like.”

At his eponymous blog, Ed Mannino weighs in on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court ruled in favor of a baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, arguing that “the court was wise to limit its opinion, and to permit the lower courts to decide particular cases based upon their specific facts and circumstances.” At The Daily Wire, Jacob Airey interviews the baker, Jack Phillips, and his counsel about “the build-up to the case, the outcome, and what it means for religious freedom.” Additional commentary comes from Vikram David Amar and Alan Brownstein at Justia’s Verdict blog, who remark that “what may be most memorable and important in this opinion is not the analytic moves it makes, but the tone it employs and the message about respect, civility, and dignity it tries to send.”

Briefly:

• At Howe on the Court, Amy Howe takes a shot at predicting who may be writing the majority opinions in the 19 argued cases awaiting decision this term.
• At The Hill, Lydia Wheeler reports that the Supreme Court “has long[] shied away from policing congressional maps without a clear way to measure how much political bias in redistricting is too much,” and that “[e]xperts agree it would be a game changer if the court is able to find a workable test [in this term’s two partisan-gerrymandering cases, Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone,] to assess when legislators have gone too far in drawing congressional maps that give their party an edge.”
• At Slate, Jeremy Stahl maintains that although the government relied on what it described during the oral argument in Trump v. Hawaii, a challenge to the latest version of the Trump administration’s entry ban, as a “straightforward waiver process” to help justify the ban, “new, previously undisclosed statements from two consular officers tasked with implementing the travel ban’s provisions contradict this depiction.”
• In the latest episode of First Mondays, Dan Epps and Ian Samuel discuss what last week’s decision in contracts-clause case Sveen v. Melin “means for a certain advocate’s win-loss record,” “why registering to vote shouldn’t be so difficult, what happens when an 8-member Court is equally divided, how to keep things chill at the polls, and which version of the dictionary is the best version.”
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost suggests that the court’s decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, in which the justices upheld Ohio’s process for purging infrequent voters from its rolls, “giv[es] election officials in other states a roadmap if they want to emulate Ohio’s Jon Husted in bragging not about registering more voters but about removing once-qualified voters from registration rolls.”
• At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, law student James Hannaway finds the result in China Agritech v. Resh, in which the court held that the rule suspending the statute of limitations for individual claims filed after a failed class action does not apply to subsequent class actions, “far from surprising given the Court’s general skepticism towards aggregate litigation.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in this case.]

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