Daniel Hemel and Aziz Huq on the Supreme Court's "Monumental" Term
Supreme Court To Open A Whirlwind Term
George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen notes that this case for the first time forces the court to confront whether law enforcement can track someone's public movements for months on end, without a search warrant. "And the answer to that question," he warns, "will determine whether tiny drones can fly in the air and follow us from door to door and reconstruct our movements for a month, whether other forms of ubiquitous surveillance are permissible."
However, as University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq observes, "it's extremely unappetizing from the court's perspective to imagine a world in which the government needs probable cause every time it obtains any kind of data about a person from a third party."
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Then too, there are a variety of challenges to the labor movement and labor unions this term. The tea leaves in these cases do not read well for unions.
For instance, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the court deadlocked on the question of reversing a decades-old decision of critical importance to public employee unions, and likely private unions as well. In 1977, by a 6-3 vote, the high court ruled that non-union members in a unionized shop of public employees can be required to contribute partial dues to cover the costs of negotiating a contract that will benefit them too. For the last several years, the conservatives on the current court have been trying to reverse that decision. It is highly likely that with Justice Gorsuch now on the court, that day is near in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31.
As University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel put it, "It's been a bad decade, really a bad quarter century for the labor movement at the Supreme Court. I think this will be a particularly bad year in that bad quarter century."
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