Williams & Connolly partner Kannon Shanmugam and Lawrence, Kansas, native will make a milestone argument today at the US Supreme Court. Plus: the justices gave the SG's office a rare deadline, just in time for the holidays (and well before the end of the term.) And hop into a roundup of key rulings featuring endangered species, including last week's decision on the dusky gopher frog. Scroll down for SCOTUS headlines. Thanks for reading Supreme Court Brief. Feedback is welcome. Contact us at [email protected] and [email protected].

Shanmugam's Jayhawk Milestone

When Williams & Connolly partner Kannon Shanmugam completes his oral argument today in Helsinn Healthcare v. Teva Pharmaceuticals, he will be able to boast about reaching a rather unique milestone: He will be the Indian-American lawyer from Lawrence, Kansas with the most oral arguments before the high court.

Today's argument is Shanmugam's 26th before the high court, surpassing the only other lawyer in this select category: Sri Srinivasan, who argued 25 times before becoming a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2013.

Shanmugam, 46, was born in Lawrence of immigrants from India. Srinivasan, 51, was born in India and raised in Lawrence. Growing up, they knew each other despite their age difference. Shanmugam told us some years ago that the Srinivasans were known as “the other Indian family in town. We've been friends forever.”

Both interned, at different times, for then-Tenth Circuit judge Deanell Tacha, who had chambers in Lawrence.

“I could have told you when they were in high school that they'd be terrific lawyers,” Tacha said in 2010. “They both had analytical minds and both had the ability to take very difficult concepts and get to the nub of the issue.” She added that they were both fans of the Kansas Jayhawks, the University of Kansas basketball team. With any luck, one or both of them will be watching the Jayhawks play on television tonight.

Shanmugam declined to comment about his feat, and Srinivasan did not respond to a request for comment. >> Another unusual fact about the Helsinn argument: One of the lawyers arguing the Helsinn case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 2016 was William Havemann, then an appellate lawyer in the civil division of the Justice Department. Havemann is now a law clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer, which probably means Havemann will recuse himself from doing any work on whatever opinion or dissent Breyer might write in the case.

Rare Deadline for the Solicitor General

It is routine for the Supreme Court to “invite” the solicitor general to file a brief in a pending case in which the United States is not a party, but might have an interest that could aid the justices in deciding whether the case warrants review. (It's not an invitation to be declined.)

But what was very unusual in Monday's order list was that in seeking two CVSG (Call for the Views of the Solicitor General) briefs, the court gave the SG a deadline for filing them: “on or before 4 p.m., Friday, January 4, 2019.” The Clean Water Act cases are: County of Maui, HI v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund, and Kinder Morgan Energy v. Upstate Forever.

The SG's office often takes months to respond to the court's call, as its lawyers consult with various federal agencies that might have something to say about the case. By giving the office a deadline, the court is likely signaling that it wants the cases teed up for review in time for them to be argued during the current term – that is, if the cases are granted cert.

One other consequence is that December just got a lot busier for the SG's office. As Sean Marotta of Hogan Lovells put it in a tweet, the court's action was “(1) new, (2) nontraditional, and (3) must be setting off a wave of groans at the already-burdened SG's office.”

And some court watchers observed that the SG's office is now under a time pressure similar to what it has been imposing on federal appellate courts and even the Supreme Court with its recent, multiple emergency applications for stays in cases involving Trump Administration policies, such as the transgender military ban, sanctuary city funding and the census citizenship question, among others.

On Dusky Gopher Frogs, Northern Spotted Owls & Other Endangered Species

The dusky gopher frog at the center of the Supreme Court decision on Nov. 20 in Weyerhaeuser Company v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is not the first endangered species that environmentalists, government agencies and others have fought to protect before the justices. But the Roberts Court has not been very protective, continuing a trend that began in the 1990s.

Here's a refresher on endangered species at the center of five other key high court rulings:

>> In Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, the Little Tennessee River was the critical habitat of the endangered snail darter. The justices in 1978 held that impoundment of water behind the Tellico Dam would totally destroy the snail darter's habitat. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the 6-3 decision protecting the snail darter. This case was the inspiration for the 2013 book, “The Snail Darter and the Dam: How Pork-Barrel Politics Endangered a Little Fish and Killed a River,” by environmental law scholar Zygmunt Plater of Boston College Law School.

>> Nearly 20 years later in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Better Oregon, a group of landowners and logging companies claimed that the presence of northern spotted owls (a threatened species) and the red-cockaded woodpecker (endangered) was preventing them from developing and logging on their land. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the 6-3 decision that continued to protect the species' habitat.

>> In the 1997 case Bennett v. Spear, two endangered species of sucker fish were at risk in a water dispute between the Fish and Wildlife Service and irrigation districts and ranchers.

>> That negative shift in the act's fortunes increased in 2007 with National Association of Home Builders v. Defenders of Wildlife. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. leda 5-4 majority in ruling that EPA's transfer of certain permitting authority to Arizona was not illegal because EPA failed to assess the impacts of state-issued permits on federally endangered species, including the Pima pineapple cactus and the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl. Writing in dissent, Justice Stevens said: “Today the court turns its back on our decision in Hill and places a great number of endangered species in jeopardy.”

>> And two years later in Winter v. National Resources Defense Council, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote the 5-4 majority opinion holding that the public interest in conducting naval training exercises involving the use of sonar in southern California waters outweighed even certain irreparable harms to marine mammals, such as whales.

The fate of the dusky gopher frog's designated “critical habitat” in a site in Louisiana is headed back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The justices—unanimously—vacated a ruling against Weyerhaeuser and directed the appellate court to determine whether the Louisiana site is a habitable habitat for the frogs, now Mississippi residents.

Supreme Court Headlines: What We're Reading

>> Sounds familiar: “When you sit through almost all the Supreme Court arguments in a week, a month or even a term (as The Associated Press does), you hear the same phrases over and over. Some justices have a sort of verbal signature, phrases they employ to disagree—more or less politely—with a lawyer arguing in front of them.” According to the report: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, for example, “wants you to know she's sorry. Justice Neil Gorsuch is only asking for some help.” [AP]

>> Will Mueller be mentioned? “The Supreme Court next week takes up the case of a small-time Alabama felon, Terance Gamble, who complains that his convictions by state and federal prosecutors for the same gun possession crime violate constitutional protections against double jeopardy. But likely to be watching the proceedings closely will be those concerned about a big-time felon, Republican consultant and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was prosecuted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III for tax fraud. [The Washington Post]

>> Do-over: The Supreme Court's ruling last term on union “fair share fees”—Janus v. AFSCME—has revived a challenge to mandatory bar association fees. [NLJ]

>> If at first you don't succeed: ”The Justice Department is planning an unusual appeal to stop the governments of the State of Maryland and the District of Columbia from using a federal lawsuit to demand access to information about whether President Donald Trump is using his luxury Washington hotel to unconstitutionally profit from his office.” [Politico]