Did you miss your Supreme Court news this week? Let our Weekly Roundup help. (To stay on top of the latest Supreme Court happenings, follow @ISCOTUS on Twitter.)

The Court convened for their November 22 conference on Tuesday but did not announce which, if any, petitions have been granted certiorari.

Lara Bazelon of Slate discusses Chief Justice John Roberts role in a Court with one or more Trump nominees, hinting that Roberts might be a safeguard against an ideologically fueled rescission of landmark cases like Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. “As chief justice, he has a unique responsibility to safeguard the integrity of the third branch of government,” she writes. “If the Supreme Court devolves into an ideological mouthpiece, as overtly political as Congress and the White House, Robert’s decade-long advocacy for judicial restraint and respect for precedent will be read as cant. Roberts himself will be seen as a hypocrite who put his personal preferences above the rule of law. History will view him as a failure. And John Roberts does not intend to fail. He is keenly aware of his institutional role and he cares deeply about legacy—the court’s and his own.”

Amy Frost of SCOTUSBlog investigates whether a single district judge has the ability to issue a nationwide injunction against the federal government programs or regulations. Frost analyzes UCLA Law Professor Samuel L. Bray’s paper  “Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction”, published November 6, 2016. She describes Bray’s argument that while nationwide injunctions do provide some benefits, such as reducing inconsistency in the administration of federal orders across jurisdictions, the overall effect is largely detrimental. Nationwide injunctions, for example, encourage forum-shopping and make it less likely that the Supreme Court will have the benefit of percolation — consideration of an issue by multiple lower courts.

Amy Howe of SCOTUSBlog provides an in-depth preview of Moore v. Texas, which will be argued on November 29. The defendant in this case, Bobby James Moore, was sentenced to death thirty years ago, but argues that because of his intellectual disability, it would be unconstitutional to execute him. Moore examines whether or not it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment to reject evidence demonstrating that Moore is intellectually disabled under current medical standards and not the standard to determine intellectual disability used in this case – one that was developed in 1992. Tim Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, weighs in on the ramifications of the outdated standard in an op-ed for Time, writing “[i]n this case, fiction and stigma [trump] science and the Constitution. Never mind that the Texas factors for determining intellectual disability are not used in any medical or clinical setting in the nation. In fact, they’re not even used elsewhere in Texas. In countless situations where the state is responsible for determining intellectual disability, it uses current scientific standards. The inaccurate Texas standard reinforces one of the most damaging stereotypes about people with intellectual disability—that they can’t be “good” at anything. The reasoning is dangerous and flawed: if you can mow a lawn, you can’t have an intellectual disability. If you have an intellectual disability, therefore, you can’t do anything. Both are wrong—dangerously wrong.”

Did you miss your Supreme Court news this week? Let our Weekly Roundup help. (To stay on top of the latest Supreme Court happenings, follow @ISCOTUS on Twitter.)

Despite not adding any new cases or hearing argument this week, the Court played a prominent role in the news. In an interview on 60 Minutes that aired on Sunday, President-Elect Trump declared he believes gay marriage rights are “settled.”  He indicated, however, that he would appoint pro-life justices to the Court who would reverse Roe v. Wade. As Joan Biskupic of CNN reports this is the first time since 1969 that a newly elected president will be able to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. President Nixon came into office with a vacancy left due to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s retirement. Before Congress even confirmed Nixon’s nominee for Chief Justice, Warren Burger, Associate Justice Abe Fortas resigned. Although the Senate confirmed Burger, it blocked President Nixon’s first two nominees to replace Fortas before confirming Justice Harry Blackmun.

The Hill reports that Senator Dianne Feinstein will become the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee next year. She will be the first women to be a ranking member of the committee, and will have a prominent role in vetting any Supreme Court Justice nomination after the President-Elect takes office. She has stated that she will pay “close attention,” to anyone Trump nominates, suggesting that she is willing to battle his or her confirmation.

Justice Sotomayor was also in the news this week. When asked about the outcome of the election, she stated that the country “can’t afford to despair.” She reiterated that the current even number of justices is not “ideal,” but that they have been doing the best that they can to avoid split decisions, and have affirmed by an equally divided court in only four cases since the death of Justice Scalia. However, as ABC News reports, she went on to say that the Court functions better with nine justices, as they are able to come to a definite conclusion on issues.

Also this week, Justice Ginsburg put down her gavel for a bit and made her opera debut with the Washington National Opera recently. She played “The Duchess” in “The Daughter of the Regiment” on opening night. As NBC reports, Justice Ginsburg and the late Justice Scalia both shared a passion for the opera. Justice Ginsburg “tweaked” the lines for the performance to make them reflect her “day job.”

Did you miss your Supreme Court news this week? Let our Weekly Roundup help. (To stay on top of the latest Supreme Court happenings, follow @ISCOTUS on Twitter.)

Commentary about the effect of the election on the Court has begun. Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times discusses the possible repercussions on the Supreme Court, including a discussion of the 21 possible nominees that Trump’s campaign issued in September. Emily Bazelon of the New York Times also weighs in on the issue describing the Republican approach to nominations to the Court as “a new kind of hardball.”

The Court also heard argument in four cases this week. On Monday, the question before the Court in NLRB v. SW General was the scope of a provision that bars the president from nominating someone who is serving in an acting capacity to fill the job on a permanent basis unless the acting official also served as the first assistant to the vacant position for at least 90 days in the year before the job became vacant. The provision makes it more difficult for the president to evade the confirmation process for his appointees. The question here involves the scope of the provision. SW General, the respondent here, is arguing for broader scope, invalidating the appointment of the current acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Justice Anthony Kennedy told Shay Dvoretzky, who represents SW General, that that he had a “very strong” argument based on the text: the reference by the provision at issue to “a person” who serves in an acting capacity “under this section,” e to be acting appointeeswhich could be construed as applying the restriction on nominating someone who is serving in an acting role to all categories of individuals who are eligible, but overall the justices seemed divided. Lydia Wheeler of The Hill discusses other highlights from Monday’s arguments.

On Tuesday, the Court heard arguments in Bank of America v. Miami and Wells Fargo v. Miami, which are consolidated. The case presents the issue of whether Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just injury-in-fact when it limited lawsuits to “aggrieved person(s)”; and whether proximate cause requires more than the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through a chain of contingencies. Attorney Neal Katyal, representing the banks, told the justices Tuesday that a ruling for the cities would create an “unlimited theory of liability.” Not only could thousands of cities bring similar lawsuits, he said, but many other plaintiffs, including landlords, could also bring lawsuits. Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog discusses the arguments further in her argument analysis. And ABC News notes that “some of the justices said they worried about opening the courthouse door to shop owners, gardeners and other companies that might lose business as a result of home foreclosures.”

Also on Tuesday, the Court heard Lightfoot v. Cendant Mortgage Corp. The issue in the case is whether a lawsuit has federal jurisdiction merely because the Federal National Mortgage Association, also known as Fannie Mae, is a party. Early in the presentation of Joshua Rosenkranz on behalf Monique Lightfoot, the plaintiff suing Fannie Mae, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read a passage from the opinion in American National Red Cross v. S.G. & A.E. that, in her view, “seems to say if you authorize suit in federal court, that’s it. Specifically mentioning federal court suffices to confer federal jurisdiction.” SCOTUSblog breaks down the arguments on either side, here.

The Court heard its final arguments of the week on Wednesday in Lynch v. Morales-Santana. The court must decide whether Congress’s decision to impose differing gender-based physical-presence (in the United States) requirements on citizen parents of foreign-born children violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. More specifically, the challenged law grants citizenship to the child who is born abroad to an unmarried US citizen mother if the mother lived in the United States for one continuous year, while a child born abroad with an unmarried US citizen father receives citizenship only if the father lived in the United States for at least ten years — five of them after the age of 14. The Court previously considered this question but split 4-4 (with Justice Kagan recused) in Flores-Villar v. United States. Because even without Justice Kagan, there were four votes in favor of finding the differential treatment unconstitutional, it is likely that there will now be five votes for that position.

In this week’s argument, Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler, arguing on behalf of the United States, said that the different treatment of unmarried mothers and fathers served two interests: ensuring that U.S. citizens have sufficient ties to the United States and avoiding a scenario in which the children of U.S.-citizen mothers are born “stateless” – meaning, with no citizenship at all. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Kneedler why unmarried U.S.-citizen fathers would have less of a connection to the United States than unmarried mothers. And Justice Elena Kagan asked him why the government couldn’t achieve those goals using “entirely gender-neutral language” that would apply to both unmarried fathers and unmarried mothers. Scott Michelman of Slate.com explains how this case “provides a small but meaningful snapshot of how sex-based laws written in that very era [1950s] are viewed by the branch of government most likely to provide a check on the new president’s power.” As SCOTUSblog points out, the key precedents at issue here are from cases argued by Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself. The case also requires the Court to consider the appropriate remedy if it does find the statute unconstitutional.

Finally, in other Supreme Court news, on Monday, the Court denied certiorari in OXY USA Inc. v. Schell. This case analyzes whether the fact that a pending appeal “played no significant role” in an appellant’s voluntarily mooting a case, Alvarez v. Smith, is the only factor in determining whether to vacate a lower court’s judgment or whether a party must make an additional showing of compelling circumstances favoring vacatur.