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From The Travel Ban To Digital Privacy, This Term's SCOTUS Docket

In this June 1, 2017, file photo, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather for an official group portrait. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
In this June 1, 2017, file photo, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather for an official group portrait. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

The Supreme Court readies to weigh in on gerrymandering, digital privacy, and the gay marriage wedding cake. We’ll look at the docket for the new term.

The US Supreme Court heads into a new term next week with a full bench of nine justices and plenty on the docket. Partisan gerrymandering – redistricting – will get a review by the court. Just how tightly can one party lock up a district? Cell phone privacy is there. Should police need a warrant to track you everywhere? And we’ll hear about Masterpiece Cake in Colorado, and whether its baker should have baked for a gay marriage. This hour, On Point: The Supreme Court dives in. –Tom Ashbrook.

Guests

Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst and Supreme Court biographer. Author of biographies on justices Sonia Sotomayor, Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O’Connor. (@JoanBiskupic)

David Savage, longtime Supreme Court correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. (@DavidGSavage)

From Tom’s Reading List

The Los Angeles Times: Here Are The Major Questions Before The Supreme Court This Fall — “The Supreme Court opens its new term Oct. 2 and will quickly take up major disputes involving President Trump, immigration policy, religious liberty, gay rights and partisan gerrymandering.”

Law.com: SCOTUS Forecast: Blockbuster Cases Set Table for Big Term — “The term beginning Oct. 2 is front-loaded with arguments in marquee cases on the President Donald Trump travel ban and partisan gerrymandering, as well as key business disputes ranging from arbitration and labor law to corporate liability for wrongdoing abroad. ‘We can safely predict that next term will be a momentous one,’ Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in late July before Duke Law School students in Washington.“There are more blockbuster cases scheduled for October alone than there were all of last year,” said Kannon Shanmugam, head of Williams & Connolly’s Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice. “When all is said and done, this could be the most consequential term yet for the Roberts Court.'”

The Atlantic: America’s Red and Blue Judges — “American law and justice have always suffered from a kind of cognitive dissonance. The ideal of even-handed justice is widely hailed; but everyone at some level knows that, if law in fact has two hands, it holds politics in both of them…That dissonance, however, seems particularly marked this fall. Not since the New Deal crisis of 1937 has the Supreme Court been so clearly revealed to the world as fully enmeshed in the rankest partisan politics. There seems little prospect of disengagement any time soon.”

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