ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

The U.S. Supreme Court entertained oral arguments yesterday in what Legal Times Supreme Court correspondent Tony Mauro described as possibly the Court’s “top environmental and employment discrimination cases of the term.” In Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the high court is weighing a federal appeals court decision that put limits on the Navy’s use of sonar training off the coast of Southern California. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit placed restrictions on the exercises, saying that sonar produces noise damaging to whales. The justices, Mauro notes, appeared more sympathetic to the Navy’s argument that national security demands full use of sonar in its training exercises.

The Court, Mauro reports, also appeared reluctant to side with the employer retaliation claim in Crawford v. Nashville. The Court in Crawford is considering an appeal of a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, denying an employee’s retaliation claim. See an ACSBlog guest post on Crawford, from the First Amendment Center’s David L. Hudson.