Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘Supreme Court’

Supreme Court rules for Abercrombie hijab claimant

I’ve got a new post up at Cato about the Supreme Court’s decision in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores Inc. The Court’s 8-1 ruling on fairly narrow grounds in favor of the headscarf-wearing claimant isn’t very surprising, for reasons I explain in the piece. The ruling could expose employers to more liability, particularly of the sued-if-you-do, sued-in-you-don’t variety, since it encourages employers to pry into employees’ religious views or adopt stereotyped views about what their religious scruples should be presumed to be. Still, eight Justices were content to resolve the dispute on relatively dry statutory interpretation grounds, with only Justice Clarence Thomas interested in interrogating the law at a more fundamental level. (Why, he wonders, is equal treatment based on non-religious considerations now considered “intentional discrimination” based on religion?)

P.S. More coverage: Daniel Fisher, Daniel Schwartz, Philip Miles. (More: Marci Hamilton.) And when might a National Review author favor limiting private employers’ liberty? When it’s a religious discrimination case.

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Supreme Court and constitutional law roundup

  • “Laura & Marvin Horne’s Story”, video on raisin takings case, features the great Michael McConnell [YouTube, earlier]
  • Actor Edward Gero shines as Antonin Scalia in new stage play The Originalist but script doesn’t really understand originalists or Federalist Society types, thinks John McGinnis [City Journal]
  • McGinnis on the difference between “big”/philosophical cases and normal cases at the Supreme Court [Liberty and Law]
  • Ninth Circuit should call foul on Montana’s racial preferences in state contracting [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]
  • Narrowly divided court in Wynne v. Comptroller finds Dormant Commerce Clause forbids double taxation by Maryland, which might have implications for California’s power to regulate the whole world [Michael Greve/Law and Liberty, Daniel Fisher]
  • Ilya Shapiro is keeping score of how many unanimous cases Obama administration has lost before Supreme Court [twenty, as of May 1; American Spectator, auto-plays ad]
  • Spokeo lawsuit under Fair Credit Reporting Act gives Court chance to clarify standing for uninjured plaintiffs [Will Baude, New York Times; Daniel Fisher]

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California AG Kamala Harris demands donor list of a 501 (c) (3)

That raises the possibility of later disclosure of the information, retaliation against donors, or both; whether it’s unusual enough for the U.S. Supreme Court to step in to stop it remains to be seen. Harris’s target and adversary in the resulting suit, by coincidence or otherwise, is the “Center for Competitive Politics, a vigorous supporter of political free-speech rights that does not get involved in election campaigns” but does speak out strongly about the First Amendment implications of campaign regulation; we’ve often cited its work and that of its founder, Brad Smith. [Lyle Denniston, SCOTUSBlog; Instapundit, citing “Supreme Court’s 1958 decision in NAACP v. Alabama, in which the Court unanimously protected the NAACP’s membership lists against compelled disclosure to Alabama officials.”]

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Supreme Court and constitutional law roundup

  • Polls, not chancy politics of Justice-watching, represent surest hope for gay-marriage supporters [me in New York Daily News]
  • “A reasonably good week for the Fourth Amendment” [Jonathan Blanks, Cato on Rodriguez v. U.S. on prolonged traffic stops, 6-3 SCOTUS, and from the D.C. Circuit, Janice Rogers Brown’s concurrence in Gross v. U.S., on rationale for D.C.’s gun sweeps]
  • David Bernstein, who has done so much to enrich our understanding of Lochner v. New York, hears from Mr. Lochner’s great-granddaughter [Volokh Conspiracy]
  • Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center: Supremacy Clause doesn’t provide implied private right of action [William Baude, SCOTUSBlog; James Beck (implication for product liability); from the losing side, Steve Vladeck/Prawfs]
  • Please, SCOTUS, kill off for good the awful Calder v. Jones “effects” test for personal jurisdiction [David Post] “We’re Not in Kansas: No General Jurisdiction After Bauman” [Steven Boranian, Drug and Device Law]
  • Noah Feldman, for one, isn’t buying Toobin’s latest sanctimonious swipe at Scalia [Bloomberg View]
  • Usage of commas in famous first line of Pride and Prejudice can shed light on how to read Constitutional guarantee of right to keep and bear arms [Eugene Volokh]

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Supreme Court hears raisin case again

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Horne v. USDA, with many Justices skeptical of the government’s position that it can seize nearly half of a family’s raisin crop under a USDA program without creating a “taking” for which it would owe just compensation under the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Cato filed an amicus brief on behalf of the raisin-farming Horne family, as it had also done at earlier stages of the protracted case [our earlier coverage; my colleague Trevor Burrus’s write-up from March; Damon Root, Reason] And The Daily Show (“raisin outlaw”).

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Supreme Court roundup

  • In a new Cato podcast, I talk with Caleb Brown about the Court’s pending case on “disparate impact” liability in housing and finance, Texas Dept. of Housing vs. The Inclusive Communities Project [earlier, more]
  • Amicus briefs urge Court to recognize regulatory taking in raisin marketing order requisition case Horne v. Department of Agriculture [Trevor Burrus, Ilya Somin, earlier]
  • Organized campaign to disrupt Supreme Court sittings is sure to raise the concern of groups devoted to backing judicial independence. Right? [Orin Kerr, Legal Times, earlier on selective vision of some of the latter groups here, here, etc.]
  • Under the surface, routine decision in Perez indicates Justices’ changing attitudes toward Chevron, Auer, and agency deference in administrative law [Sasha Volokh]
  • Vong v. Aune, arising from Arizona cosmetology board ban on Asian “fish pedicure” techniques, could enable Court to examine economic rationality of regulation [Ilya Shapiro]
  • “Justices stick to middle of the road in Omnicare securities opinion” [Alison Frankel/Reuters, Bainbridge]
  • Sequel to Harris v. Quinn? In Center for Individual Rights’s Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case Court could revisit Abood question of public sector agency shop [On Labor, Larry Sand/City Journal]

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Supreme Court roundup

Very Cato-centric this time:

  • Perez v. Mortgage Bankers: yes, agencies can dodge notice and comment requirements of Administrative Procedures Act by couching action as other than making new rule [SCOTUSBlog and more links, earlier; Michael Greve and followup; Daniel Fisher on concurrence by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito and related on Thomas, Alito concurrences in Amtrak case]
  • New Jersey high court is unreasonably hostile to arbitration clauses, which raises issues worthy of review [Shapiro on Cato cert petition]
  • “When Wisconsin Officials Badger Their Political Opponents, It’s a Federal Case” [Ilya Shapiro, earlier here, here, etc.]
  • Richard Epstein on King v. Burwell oral argument [Hoover, earlier]
  • With Profs. Bill Eskridge and Steve Calabresi, Cato files probably its last same-sex marriage brief before SCOTUS [Shapiro; Timothy Kincaid, Box Turtle Bulletin]
  • On Abercrombie (religious headscarf) case, Jon Hyman sees an edge for plaintiff at supposedly pro-business Court [Ohio Employer Law Blog, earlier]
  • A different view on Fourth Amendment challenge to cops’ warrantless access to hotel guest registries [James Copland on Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz brief; earlier Cato amicus]
  • “Why the Court Should Strike Down the Armed Career Criminal Act as Unconstitutionally Vague” [Trevor Burrus]

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King v. Burwell oral argument

Above is an introductory video on King v. Burwell, the ObamaCare exchange subsidy challenge, from my Cato colleagues Michael Cannon and Trevor Burrus, introduced by Caleb Brown. Tomorrow you can stream this Cato reaction panel on the Court’s arguments featuring Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Simon Lazarus of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post; and Michael Cannon, moderated by Ilya Shapiro of Cato.

While I’ve mostly left the analysis of King v. Burwell to others at Cato (aside from gathering links to others’ work here at Overlawyered) I did respond when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman employed what I called “remarkably ugly and truculent” terms to assail the challenge, saying it could succeed only in a “corrupt” Supreme Court.

P.S. While the lawprof amicus brief on behalf of the Obama administration garbs itself in the wolf pelt of severe textualism, Jonathan Adler spies the fluffy sheep beneath.

And: an after-the-argument statement by Ilya Shapiro (“If the government wins here, then not only will Obamacare continue to be rewritten by the IRS, but any executive agency – and any future president – will be able to rewrite any law.”).

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SCOTUS: fish not “documents” or “records” under Dodd-Frank

Ilya Shapiro comments [link fixed now] on the Supreme Court’s ruling this morning in Yates v. United States that the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law’s prohibition on evasive destruction of “tangible objects” cannot be used to prosecute a fisherman who discarded undersized grouper in hopes of avoiding enforcement. “How does one make a false entry on a fish?” asked Justice Samuel Alito in a concurrence, while dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, citing Dr. Seuss’s “One Fish Two Fish,” disagreed with the prevailing justices’ view that the statute’s prohibition on destruction of “tangible objects” should be read in conjunction with references elsewhere in its text to files and information. [David Lat/Above the Law; ABA Journal] Earlier here.

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