I apologize for briefly disappearing, but I had a few clients interested in this orders list.
Cert. was denied in a case challenging the President's tariffs on the steel industry.
Five-minute buzzer just sounded.
Adam Liptak reports two boxes.
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Okay, headed in to wait for opinions now. Back in a few.
Justice Gorsuch has two opinions. The first is in US v. Davis. The court holds that Section 924(c)(3)(B) is unconstitutionally vague.
This was a case about the definition of the phrase “crime of violence,” for purposes of a federal criminal prosecution for using a gun during such a crime.
The vote was 5-4. Gorsuch's opinion was joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Kavanaugh dissents, joined by Thomas and Alito; Roberts joined all but one part of the dissent.
This is Gorsuch channeling Justice Scalia again.
Kavanaugh's dissent is significantly longer than Gorsuch's opinion.
Davis is another in a series of cases finding statutory standards like "crime of violence" to be too vague.
The Kavanaugh dissent starts "Crime and firearms form a dangerous mix."
We are getting another opinion from Gorsuch. Going back in to wait for it and others.
This will go down as another split between Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in terms of their tendency to side with the Court's liberal wing, but I think this is not remotely surprising to Court watchers. Gorsuch has channeled this aspect of Justice Scalia's jurisprudence (as many have noted) while Kavanaugh has -- throughout his career -- generally been a law-and-order conservative on issues like this one.
Interesting, the Chief Justice declines to join the portion of Justice Kavanaugh's dissent that relies on constitutional avoidance.
The second opinion is Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media. The decision of the Eighth Circuit is reversed and remanded.
The court holds first that the Food Marketing Institute has standing to appeal because disclosure of the contested data would cause its members some financial injury in the highly competitive grocery industry.
The court holds next that when commercial or financial information is both customarily and actually treated as private by its owner and is provided to the government under an assurance of privacy, the information is "confidential" for purposes of Exemption 4.
Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, would have adopted a standard that would result in more disclosures to the public -- because they would have required a showing of harm.
Justice Kagan has the opinion of the court in Iancu v. Brunetti. This was the case in which the justices were considering whether the ban on scandalous or immoral trademarks violates the First Amendment. The answer is yes.
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