Amy Howe

Apr 29 2019

No new grants today

The justices issued orders today from last week’s private conference. They did not add any new cases to their merits docket for next term.

The justices asked the U.S. solicitor general to weigh in on a dispute between computer technology giants Google and Oracle that one publication has called the “copyright lawsuit of the decade.” Google had asked the Supreme Court to review two questions: Whether copyright protection extends to software interfaces and whether Google’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes “fair use,” which does not infringe a copyright. There is no deadline for the solicitor general to file his brief.

The Supreme Court did not act on two high-profile petitions that they considered at last week’s conference: Box v. Planned Parenthood, a challenge to the constitutionality of an Indiana law that bars abortions based on (among other things) the sex or disability of the fetus and requires fetal remains to be buried or cremated, and Klein v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, filed by an Oregon couple who declined on religious grounds to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding.

The justices’ next conference is Thursday, May 9. We expect orders from that conference to be released on Monday, May 13, at 9:30 a.m.

This post was also published on SCOTUSblog.

Amy L Howe
Until September 2016, Amy served as the editor and reporter for SCOTUSblog, a blog devoted to coverage of the Supreme Court of the United States; she continues to serve as an independent contractor and reporter for SCOTUSblog. Before turning to full-time blogging, she served as counsel in over two dozen merits cases at the Supreme Court and argued two cases there. From 2004 until 2011, she co-taught Supreme Court litigation at Stanford Law School; from 2005 until 2013, she co-taught a similar class at Harvard Law School. She has also served as an adjunct professor at American University’s Washington College of Law and Vanderbilt Law School. Amy is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a master’s degree in Arab Studies and a law degree from Georgetown University.
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