Thursday round-up

In the latest entry on the Supreme Court’s unofficial coronavirus docket, the court divided 5-4 on Wednesday over health-and-safety protocols designed to curb the spread of COVID-19 in a California county jail. The five conservative justices voted to temporarily put a stop to a lower court’s injunction that had required the jail to take various specific steps, such as allowing inmates to engage in social distancing. SCOTUSblog’s full story on the emergency ruling is here. Additional coverages comes from Adam Liptak of the New York Times and Greg Stohr of Bloomberg.

Briefly:

• In the Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin reports on a new Gallup poll showing that 58% of Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s performance – the highest approval rating for the justices in 11 years.
• At Verdict, Michael Dorf argues that recent leaks about the court’s private deliberations reveal nothing important that cannot be inferred from publicly available material. In a follow-up on his blog, Dorf on Law, he argues that such leaks are not even informative for people who do not closely follow the court’s work.
• In the Daily Journal, Kimya Forouzan discusses the court’s decision last month in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania. Forouzan writes that the decision will curtail access to birth control and “will most significantly impact people of color and people with lower incomes.”

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