A Seat at the Sitting - April 2023

Each month, a panel of constitutional experts convenes to discuss the Court’s upcoming docket sitting by sitting. The cases covered in this preview are listed below.

• Slack Technologies v. Pirani (April 17) - Securities, Financial Services; Whether, to bring a securities lawsuit alleging misstatements in a registration statement, a plaintiff must plead and show that he bought shares registered under the allegedly misleading statement.
• US ex rel. Schutte v. SuperValu Inc. & United States ex rel. Proctor v. Safeway [Consolidated] (April 18) - Financial Services; Whether and when a defendant’s subjective knowledge about whether its conduct was legal is relevant to whether it “knowingly” submitted false claims for payment to the government or “knowingly” made false statements in support of such claims in violation of the False Claims Act.
• Groff v. Dejoy (April 18) - Labor, Religious Liberties; Whether to overrule the Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, on the accommodations that employers must provide for their employees’ religious practices.
• Counterman v. Colorado (April 19) - Free Speech; To determine whether statements are “true threats” that are not protected by the Constitution, should courts apply an objective test that considers whether a reasonable person would regard the statement as a threat of violence, or instead a subjective test that requires prosecutors to show that the speaker intended to make a threat?
• Lac du Flambeua Band v. Coughlin (April 24) - Tribal Law; Whether the Bankruptcy Code unequivocally expresses Congress’s intent to abrogate the sovereign immunity of Native American tribes.
• Tyler v. Hennepin County (April 26) - Property Rights; Whether the foreclosure on and sale of a home that was worth $25,000 more than the owner owed in taxes violated the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, which bars the government from taking private property for public use without adequately compensating the property owners.

Featuring:
--Thomas F. Gede, Counsel, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP
--Sharon Fast Gustafson, Principal, Sharon Fast Gustafson, Attorney at Law, PLC
--Brian Hauss, Senior Staff Attorney, Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, ACLU
--Prof. Ilya Somin, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
--Moderator: Anastasia P. Boden, Director, Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, Cato Institute