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It's the First Monday in October
Last edited Mon Oct 2, 2017, 04:43 PM - Edit history (1)
Hat tip, AboveTheLaw: Morning Docket: 10.02.17
Back at Full Strength, Supreme Court Faces a Momentous Term
By ADAM LIPTAK OCT. 1, 2017
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, which was short-handed and slumbering for more than a year after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, is returning to the bench on Monday with a far-reaching docket that renews its central role in American life.
The new term is studded with major cases likely to provoke sharp conflicts. One of them, on political gerrymandering, has the potential to reshape American politics. Another may settle the question of whether businesses can turn away patrons like gay couples in the name of religious freedom. ... The court will hear important workers’ rights cases, including one on employers’ power to prevent workers from banding together to sue them. Perhaps the most consequential case involves fundamental principles of privacy in an age when cellphones record our every move.
“There’s only one prediction that’s entirely safe about the upcoming term,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said last month at Georgetown’s law school. “It will be momentous.”
....
Justice Gorsuch’s first full term, which will include more than the usual number of blockbusters, will bring his jurisprudence into sharper focus. ... At the same time, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is likely to decide closely divided cases as the member of the court at its ideological center, has been drifting left. According to data compiled by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Justice Kennedy’s voting in the term in which Justice Scalia died, ending last year, was the most liberal of any justice in that decisive central position since the mid-1960s.
....
Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter at @adamliptak.
By ADAM LIPTAK OCT. 1, 2017
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, which was short-handed and slumbering for more than a year after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, is returning to the bench on Monday with a far-reaching docket that renews its central role in American life.
The new term is studded with major cases likely to provoke sharp conflicts. One of them, on political gerrymandering, has the potential to reshape American politics. Another may settle the question of whether businesses can turn away patrons like gay couples in the name of religious freedom. ... The court will hear important workers’ rights cases, including one on employers’ power to prevent workers from banding together to sue them. Perhaps the most consequential case involves fundamental principles of privacy in an age when cellphones record our every move.
“There’s only one prediction that’s entirely safe about the upcoming term,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said last month at Georgetown’s law school. “It will be momentous.”
....
Justice Gorsuch’s first full term, which will include more than the usual number of blockbusters, will bring his jurisprudence into sharper focus. ... At the same time, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is likely to decide closely divided cases as the member of the court at its ideological center, has been drifting left. According to data compiled by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Justice Kennedy’s voting in the term in which Justice Scalia died, ending last year, was the most liberal of any justice in that decisive central position since the mid-1960s.
....
Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter at @adamliptak.
How Badly Is Neil Gorsuch Annoying the Other Supreme Court Justices?
By Jeffrey Toobin
September 29, 2017
In 2009 and 2010, Virginia Thomas became an outspoken opponent of the new President, Barack Obama. Ginni Thomas, as she is known, travelled the country as a leader of the growing Tea Party movement, which was particularly focussed on overturning the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Around the same time, legal challenges to the law were working their way to the Supreme Court, where Ginni’s husband, Clarence Thomas, serves. Media attention began to focus on the propriety of such a close association between a Justice and a public adversary of a law whose fate was before the Court. Then, shortly before the A.C.A. case came before the Justices, in 2012, something happened. Ginni Thomas stopped her public advocacy; indeed, she has virtually disappeared from public view in the past few years.
Why? Neither Thomas has ever addressed the issue publicly, but it’s possible to offer some informed speculation. The Justices, and especially Chief Justice John Roberts, are assiduous defenders of the Court’s reputation. As savvy denizens of Washington, D.C., they understand the political dimension of their work, but they are careful to avoid any taint of outside political activity that might raise questions about their ethics. This view is shared across the ideological spectrum at the Court, as the Justices believe, with some reason, that an attack on one of them could quickly expand into an attack on all. So did the Chief Justice suggest to Justice Thomas, in a gentle and deferential way, that perhaps his wife’s activities were reflecting poorly on the Court? And did Clarence and Ginni Thomas subsequently decide that she might dial back her outspoken role? It seems more than possible.
The retreat of Ginni Thomas brings to mind the emergence of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Earlier this week, Gorsuch gave a speech before the Fund for American Studies, a conservative educational and advocacy group. The Justices do occasionally speak before groups with high political profiles. Most of the Justices on the conservative wing have appeared in front of the Federalist Society, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen G. Breyer have addressed the American Constitution Society, the Federalists’ liberal counterpart. What made Gorsuch’s appearance especially notable was that it took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which is the focus of several pending cases that may well wind up before the Supreme Court. These lawsuits allege that the Trump family’s ownership of the hotel, which is patronized by foreigners with interests before the executive branch, violates the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Gorsuch’s presence at the hotel could look like an endorsement of the propriety of its ownership arrangements.
....
Gorsuch’s speeches might appear less distasteful to his colleagues if he had made an otherwise more graceful début on the Court. As Linda Greenhouse observed in the Times the end of Gorsuch’s first term, he managed to violate the Court’s traditions as soon as he arrived. He dominated oral arguments, when new Justices are expected to hang back. He instructed his senior colleagues, who collectively have a total of a hundred and forty years’ experience on the Court, about how to do their jobs. Dissenting from a decision that involved the interpretation of federal laws, he wrote, “If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation.” Perhaps he thought that the other Justices were unfamiliar with this thing called “legislation.” Gorsuch also expressed ill-disguised contempt for Anthony Kennedy’s landmark opinion legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Earlier this year, the Court’s majority overturned an Arkansas ruling that the state could refuse to put the name of a birth mother’s same-sex spouse on their child’s birth certificate. Dissenting, Gorsuch wrote, “Nothing in Obergefell spoke (let alone clearly) to the question.” That “let alone clearly” reflected a conservative consensus that Kennedy’s opinion was a confusing mess.
....
Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002. He is the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.”
By Jeffrey Toobin
September 29, 2017
In 2009 and 2010, Virginia Thomas became an outspoken opponent of the new President, Barack Obama. Ginni Thomas, as she is known, travelled the country as a leader of the growing Tea Party movement, which was particularly focussed on overturning the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Around the same time, legal challenges to the law were working their way to the Supreme Court, where Ginni’s husband, Clarence Thomas, serves. Media attention began to focus on the propriety of such a close association between a Justice and a public adversary of a law whose fate was before the Court. Then, shortly before the A.C.A. case came before the Justices, in 2012, something happened. Ginni Thomas stopped her public advocacy; indeed, she has virtually disappeared from public view in the past few years.
Why? Neither Thomas has ever addressed the issue publicly, but it’s possible to offer some informed speculation. The Justices, and especially Chief Justice John Roberts, are assiduous defenders of the Court’s reputation. As savvy denizens of Washington, D.C., they understand the political dimension of their work, but they are careful to avoid any taint of outside political activity that might raise questions about their ethics. This view is shared across the ideological spectrum at the Court, as the Justices believe, with some reason, that an attack on one of them could quickly expand into an attack on all. So did the Chief Justice suggest to Justice Thomas, in a gentle and deferential way, that perhaps his wife’s activities were reflecting poorly on the Court? And did Clarence and Ginni Thomas subsequently decide that she might dial back her outspoken role? It seems more than possible.
The retreat of Ginni Thomas brings to mind the emergence of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Earlier this week, Gorsuch gave a speech before the Fund for American Studies, a conservative educational and advocacy group. The Justices do occasionally speak before groups with high political profiles. Most of the Justices on the conservative wing have appeared in front of the Federalist Society, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen G. Breyer have addressed the American Constitution Society, the Federalists’ liberal counterpart. What made Gorsuch’s appearance especially notable was that it took place at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which is the focus of several pending cases that may well wind up before the Supreme Court. These lawsuits allege that the Trump family’s ownership of the hotel, which is patronized by foreigners with interests before the executive branch, violates the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Gorsuch’s presence at the hotel could look like an endorsement of the propriety of its ownership arrangements.
....
Gorsuch’s speeches might appear less distasteful to his colleagues if he had made an otherwise more graceful début on the Court. As Linda Greenhouse observed in the Times the end of Gorsuch’s first term, he managed to violate the Court’s traditions as soon as he arrived. He dominated oral arguments, when new Justices are expected to hang back. He instructed his senior colleagues, who collectively have a total of a hundred and forty years’ experience on the Court, about how to do their jobs. Dissenting from a decision that involved the interpretation of federal laws, he wrote, “If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation.” Perhaps he thought that the other Justices were unfamiliar with this thing called “legislation.” Gorsuch also expressed ill-disguised contempt for Anthony Kennedy’s landmark opinion legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Earlier this year, the Court’s majority overturned an Arkansas ruling that the state could refuse to put the name of a birth mother’s same-sex spouse on their child’s birth certificate. Dissenting, Gorsuch wrote, “Nothing in Obergefell spoke (let alone clearly) to the question.” That “let alone clearly” reflected a conservative consensus that Kennedy’s opinion was a confusing mess.
....
Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002. He is the author of “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.”
OT2017 #1: “A Very Nice Office”
Posted Mon, October 2nd, 2017 9:15 am
It’s the first Monday in October, when the Supreme Court officially starts its term. And that means that First Mondays is back for a brand new season! In today’s episode, we catch you up on the biggest grants from the Supreme Court’s “long conference,” including Janus v. American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees, which concerns the constitutionality of public-sector union agency fees. We review the calendar for the October sitting, and talk about some of the cases the justices will be hearing this week—most notably, Gill v. Whitford, the massively important political gerrymandering case. And we review the latest developments in the travel-ban case, Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project, which the court just removed from the argument calendar in light of events that may have rendered the case moot.
But that’s not all! Uncover the secrets of the solicitor general’s hidden apartment in the Department of Justice building—and its possibly unsavory origins. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about the role of apostrophes in Supreme Court cases. Get some insight into how advocates might handle the deja vu associated with rearguing a case from the previous Supreme Court term. And hear us debate how exactly police might search a moving car.
Recommended Citation: First Mondays, OT2017 #1: “A Very Nice Office”, SCOTUSblog (Oct. 2, 2017, 9:15 AM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/10/ot2017-1-nice-office/
Posted Mon, October 2nd, 2017 9:15 am
It’s the first Monday in October, when the Supreme Court officially starts its term. And that means that First Mondays is back for a brand new season! In today’s episode, we catch you up on the biggest grants from the Supreme Court’s “long conference,” including Janus v. American Federation of State, Municipal and County Employees, which concerns the constitutionality of public-sector union agency fees. We review the calendar for the October sitting, and talk about some of the cases the justices will be hearing this week—most notably, Gill v. Whitford, the massively important political gerrymandering case. And we review the latest developments in the travel-ban case, Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project, which the court just removed from the argument calendar in light of events that may have rendered the case moot.
But that’s not all! Uncover the secrets of the solicitor general’s hidden apartment in the Department of Justice building—and its possibly unsavory origins. Learn more than you ever wanted to know about the role of apostrophes in Supreme Court cases. Get some insight into how advocates might handle the deja vu associated with rearguing a case from the previous Supreme Court term. And hear us debate how exactly police might search a moving car.
Recommended Citation: First Mondays, OT2017 #1: “A Very Nice Office”, SCOTUSblog (Oct. 2, 2017, 9:15 AM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/10/ot2017-1-nice-office/
Monthly Argument Calendar October 2017
