Amy Howe

Jan 27 2020

No new grants today

The Supreme Court released orders this morning from the justices’ private conference last week. The justices once again did not act on several high-profile petitions for review that they considered at last week’s conference, including a case involving whether the state of Washington violated a florist’s constitutional rights by requiring her to provide flowers for same-sex weddings despite her religious objections and a challenge to a 2018 rule that expanded the definition of “machinegun” under federal law to include “bump-stocks” – attachments that help a semiautomatic rifle to fire faster.

The justices called for the views of the federal government in CACI Premier Technology v. al Shimari, a case brought against CACI, a government contractor that provided civilian interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, by Iraqi citizens who allege that they were abused by CACI employees while detained there. The issue on which the U.S. solicitor general will weigh in is whether an order denying CACI’s claim for derivative sovereign immunity can be appealed immediately.

The justices also ordered oral argument in a dispute between New Mexico and Texas over the use of the waters of the Pecos River, which originates in north-central New Mexico and flows into Texas, where it empties into the Rio Grande River.

The justices are now in their winter recess. Their next conference is scheduled for Friday, February 21; orders from that conference will likely be released at 9:30 a.m. on Monday, February 24.

This post is 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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