Wednesday round-up

Yesterday the Supreme Court released the calendar for the February argument session, which begins on February 24, 2020, and runs through the first week in March. Amy Howe covers the announcement for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court. She reports that “[t]he highest-profile cases of the sitting will come at the end of the session: On March 3, the justices will hear argument in the challenge to the leadership structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by argument on March 4 in the dispute over the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that requires doctors who perform abortions to have the right to admit patients at a nearby hospital.”

For The Washington Post (subscription required), Robert Barnes and Ann Marimow report that “[t]he legal cases concerning President Trump, his finances and his separation-of-powers disputes with Congress are moving like a brush fire to the Supreme Court, and together provide both potential and challenge for the Roberts court in its aspiration to be seen as nonpartisan.” Nina Totenberg discusses the cases at NPR (audio and transcript). At Balkinization, Marty Lederman addresses “the importance of the … cases[,] the weakness of Trump’s constitutional arguments … and … what the Court is likely to do with those two cases.”

For the ABA Journal, Erwin Chemerinsky previews New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, New York, a challenge to New York City’s limits on transporting personal firearms. At Education Week’s School Law Blog, Mark Walsh writes that “[a]dvocacy groups that emerged from mass school shootings in recent years are seizing an opportunity to urge the U.S. Supreme Court not to broaden the Second Amendment right to bear arms” by filing amicus briefs in the case.

Briefly:

• For The New York Times, Jesse Barron tells the story of “[h]ow a hedge fund’s efforts to take [Puerto Rico] to the cleaners wound up before the Supreme Court,” in Financial Oversight Board for Puerto Rico v. Aurelius Investment, LLC, “with ordinary Puerto Ricans arguing in the hedge fund’s favor.”
• At The National Law Review, William Thieme previews Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a constitutional challenge to the structure of the CFPB, and interviews an experienced federal agency litigator about the case’s potential “impact on the future of the CFPB.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Aaron Tang argues that “[i]n several major cases this term, conservatives are relying on arguments that both they and the court have explicitly rejected as a matter of principle over the last five decades,” warning that “[i]f the court accepts these hypocritical arguments now, it does so at its own peril.”
• The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) observes that “[t]he Supreme Court didn’t issue a landmark decision Monday, but it did shoot off a couple of flares[:] Notably, the Court rebuked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for again flouting its precedents while Justice Brett Kavanaugh put a stake down on the Constitution’s non-delegation doctrine.”
• At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog (via How Appealing), Orin Kerr pushes back against the argument that the traffic “the stop in Kansas v. Glover is problematic less because there isn’t enough suspicion but because the suspicion is not sufficiently individualized.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondent in this case.]
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes “news coverage of the justices since Roberts took over as Chief Justice in 2005.”

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