Several legal experts who weighed in on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision to not order a reinstatement of President Donald Trump's travel ban said they thought the administration had slim chances if it appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
University of California, Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said it was difficult to predict whether the Supreme Court would review the decision.
"They don't want a 4-4 split, but they really like having the last word on high-profile cases," the constitutional law expert said.
John Yoo, a law professor at UC Berkeley who worked for President George W. Bush's administration and helped write a memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects, said the Supreme Court was unlikely to agree to review the decision.
The inclusion of green-card holders in the travel ban doomed it legally, Yoo said, and the Supreme Court rarely agrees to hear such emergency appeals in any case.
Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said she thought the Supreme Court would take up the question of whether to reinstate the travel ban.
"This is probably going to the Supreme Court, but I don't think it's going anywhere good for Donald Trump _ even if the Supreme Court rules along party lines and is deadlocked, because the lower court's decision would stand."
If the Supreme Court did not take up the case or took it and was split in its ruling, the decision of the 9th Circuit Court would stand.
If it did not go to directly to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration could also ask the full 9th Circuit to review its request, said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan who was the head of civil rights for the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama.
But with a unanimous decision from the three judges who issued Thursday's opinion, Trump's chances are not good in what's known as one of the country's most reliably liberal appeals courts.
