TRUMP ANNOUNCES NEW WAVE OF JUDICIAL NOMINEES | How Suits Against DACA Dissolution Could Backfire | Sotomayor Saves The Day
September 7, 2017
WAVES DON'T DIE
|Today, PRESIDENT TRUMP announced his seventh wave of judicial nominees as he works to fill more than 100 vacancies on courts across the country. Lydia Wheeler with The Hill reports that among the 16 nominees Trump selected his own deputy assistant and deputy counsel, GREGORY KATSAS, to serve as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the nation’s second-most-powerful court.
ICYMI
|Breaking ranks with their party leadership, a long list of prominent Republicans is urging SCOTUS to find partisan gerrymandering to be unconstitutional in its upcoming case, Gill v. Whitford. However, a slew of Republican-led states have urged the Supreme Court not to get involved with what they say are essentially political decisions made by elected representatives. But if gerrymandering is just politics as usual, then why are so many leaders on both sides of the aisle sounding the alarm in the fight to end it?
BACKFIRING
|“The new round of lawsuits challenging PRESIDENT DONLAD TRUMP’S decision to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, could have an unintended consequence: making it tougher for challengers of the president’s travel-ban policy to win at the Supreme Court.” That’s Josh Gerstein with POLITICO reporting that new litigation over the phase-out of DACA could backfire on Trump’s opponents broadly.
DON'T SLEEP ON ME
|For the ABA Journal, Erwin Chemerinsky walks us through some of the sleeper cases from OT16 that didn’t make headlines but will have a significant effect on legal practice in America. Some of these decisions concerned criminal law, free speech and patent litigation.
ON THE ROAD
|Friday, JUSTICE ELENA KAGAN will be on the UW-Madison campus to talk about her life in law. Snag some free tickets HERE. It’s a first-come, first-served situation people!
TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME
|Quick question – who won the 1994 World Series? Trick question – there wasn’t a World Series that year. The players went on strike when MLB owners wanted to put a cap on their salaries, and the strike lasted so long that the rest of the regular season and postseason were canceled. And then, JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR – who was then a U.S. District court judge in New York – saved the day. She ended the strike when she issued a preliminary injunction that stopped team owners from using replacement players to start the 1995 season. The more you know!
OTHER NEWS
Alabama Inmates Ask State Supreme Court To Stop Executions
The Associated Press“Two Alabama death row inmates are asking the state Supreme Court to halt their executions scheduled for next month. Lawyers on Wednesday asked the Alabama Supreme Court to stop the executions since the 11th Circuit Court ordered hearings in a separate lawsuit challenging the humaneness of the state’s lethal injection procedure.”
Partisan Gerrymandering Must End
HuffPost“The United States Supreme Court is gearing up to hear a landmark case on partisan gerrymandering, and the future of our democracy hangs in the balance. Every American should care about the upcoming case titled Gill vs. Whitford.”