TRUMP’S TRAVEL BAN GETS FULL-COURT REVIEW: The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will bypass its normal process of having a three-judge panel consider the Trump administration’s appeal of a ruling that blocked Trump’s travel ban. The ban denied U.S. entry for people from six predominantly-Muslim countries. Most appeals are resolved with three-person panels, but the decision to have the case heard by the full court “has potential advantages for both sides,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “For the Trump administration, the court’s approach could speed up the ultimate resolution of the case. Whichever side loses has only one option remaining: an appeal to the Supreme Court.”
For the travel ban challengers, which include refugee assistance groups and others represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, “full-court consideration eliminates the possibility that they could have drawn a three-judge panel that is more conservative than the full Fourth Circuit, which has begun to lean in a more liberal direction in recent years after President Barack Obama appointed several judges to the court.”
The case will be considered on May 8th.
FEMALE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES INTERRUPTED MORE FREQUENTLY THAN MALE COUNTERPARTS: A new study found that male Supreme Court justices interrupt their female counterparts “approximately three times as often as they interrupt each other during oral arguments. And the conservative justices interrupt the liberal justices more than twice as often as vice versa,” according to Harvard Business Review. The study examined 15 years of Supreme Court oral argument transcripts, “finding that women do not have an equal opportunity to be heard on the highest court in the land.”
