Wednesday round-up

For The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that “[t]he Trump administration’s U.S. Justice Department on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court for argument time to support a challenge to New York City gun restrictions,” New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, “even though the government has not yet taken a position on whether the case is now moot, as the city contends.” Ronn Blitzer reports at Fox News that “[s]everal high-profile Senate Democrats warned the Supreme Court in pointed terms this week” in an amicus brief filed in support of the city “that it could face a fundamental restructuring if justices do not take steps to ‘heal’ the court in the near future.” At SILive, Daniel Leddy “takes a look at two key [Second Amendment] cases awaiting action by the nation’s highest court,” including the New York case.

Briefly:

• At Bloomberg Law, Meghan Tribe and Kimberly Robinson report that “competition in the Supreme Court bar” is growing, even as “the number of cases the Supreme Court agrees to hear has hit historical lows in recent terms, from upwards of 150 in the 1980s to just around 70 in recent terms.”
• WSFA News reports that Justice Sonia Sotomayor “made a surprise stop by the Selma Interpretive Center Monday afternoon.”
• Jimmy Hoover reports for Law360 (subscription required) that “Supreme Court veteran Michael Dreeben’s next move after 30 years at the U.S. Department of Justice and a stint working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller will be as a distinguished lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center.”
• At the Maryland Appellate Blog, Michael Wein notes that Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that partisan-gerrymandering challenges to electoral maps are not reviewable in federal court, “seemed to support alternatives, through Congressional action, or through the ‘state by state’ approach of non-partisan redistricting Commissions”; Wein “focuses on the Congressional action alternative, particularly as related to the history of the Populist movement also known as the ‘Progressive Era.’”
• In a Bloomberg News podcast, “Richard Garnett discusses a federal appeals court ruling allowing a Pennsylvania county to continue to display a memorial cross on its seal,” “the first test of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most recent decision on the role of religion in a pluralistic society,” The American Legion v. American Humanist Association.
• The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal warns that after “[t]he Supreme Court last year gave states a green light to collect online sales tax from out-of-state businesses without setting guardrails,” “[s]tates are now testing the limits of their taxing power and creating a web of regulatory trip-wires for small businesses.”
• At The Progressive, Bill Blum considers the impact of Chief Justice John Roberts’ jurisprudence on voting rights in the United States.

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 in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!