As the October 2018 Term is nearing it’s conclusion, we are about to hit a string of big news days from the U.S. Supreme Court.  (There are twenty cases to go with definite opinion days on this Thursday and one week from today and likely two or three more days between next Tuesday and next Friday.)  All four cases today have some legal significance for the issues that impact this website.

The least significant of the decisions came in Manhattan Community Access Corp. vs. Halleck and Virginia Uranium Inc. vs. Warren.  Halleck was a First Amendment case involving whether a private company running a community access channel on cable TV was a state actor such that any rules that the company set up for who could get access had to comply with the First Amendment.  In a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Kavanaugh that followed the conservative-liberal split, the Supreme Court found that the company was not a state actor.  So the justice most likely to have grown up watching Wayne’s World (a skit about a cable access show) ruled that the company could have denied access to potential programming.  Virginia Uranium was a weird 3-3-3 split (officially written by Justice Gorsuch) in which the majority found that the federal law governing uranium processing did not preempt a state law governing uranium mining.

In a case that would normally be very significant for this site, the Supreme Court found a way to avoid addressing the merits in a racial gerrymandering case.  In a 5-4 opinion written by Justice Ginsburg in which Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch joined the majority opinion and Justice Breyer joined the dissent, the Supreme Court in Virginia House of Delegates vs. Bethune found that one house of a state legislature did not have the right to appeal a trial court decision rejecting district lines when the rest of state government declined to continue the fight.  In reality, with the primary for Virginia’s districts having just occurred under the new lines and redistricting barely two years away, this decision is more of a punt of the underlying issues to the next cycle.  Continue Reading...