Friday round-up

By Kiera Flynn
on Jul 1, 2011 at 3:16 pm

The week wraps up with continuing coverage of this week’s decisions in Brown v. EMA and the Arizona campaign-finance cases.  At the Weekly Standard (hat-tip NPR), Jeffrey H. Anderson criticizes the decision in the video-games case as “depriving the people in the several states of the right to promote a virtuous citizenry and a decent and livable society.  People who didn’t like California’s video game policy could always have fled the state, but no American can flee Justice Scalia’s opinion.”  The editorial board of Buffalo News has a different view of the decision, which it characterizes as “correct” if ultimately “uncomfortable,” while at the Chicago Sun Times, Roger Simon describes the decision as reflecting the Court’s “ok to violence, not sex.”  And a few commentators emphasize that, in any event, parents should shoulder the real burden of screening their children’s video-game choices.  Writing for the Chicago Tribune, movie critic Michael Phillips observes that “parents of all political persuasions cannot afford to leave this ongoing debate to chance.  Or ignorance of what our kids are soaking up down there in the rec room,” while the editorial board of the Seattle Times similarly issues “a reminder to Mom and Dad that, ultimately, they are responsible for the games their children play.”

The Court’s decision in the Arizona campaign-finance cases continued to garner coverage and commentary as well.  In an op-ed for the Washington Post, columnist E.J. Dionne criticizes the holding, and the Court overall, for what he describes as its “continuing defense of the powerful.”  And Post writer T.W. Farnam explains why “the decision does not signal that the court is ready to reject all public financing for elections.” 

The end-of-term retrospectives also continue.  Lyle Denniston reviews the Term for this blog, while at NPR, Nina Totenberg identifies the two “winners” of the Term:  business and the First Amendment.  The editorial board at the Las Vegas Review-Journal echoes that sentiment with regard to the First Amendment.  At Bloomberg, Greg Stohr describes “an unprecedented dynamic [that] shaped the U.S. Supreme Court term that ended this week”:  he explains that the Court’s newest Justices “reward[ed] the men who appointed them with consistent and predictable votes.”   

At USA Today, Joan Biskupic has an interview with Justice Ginsburg, who – among other things – expresses the belief that the majority’s decision in Connick v. Thompson, reversing an award in favor of a death-row inmate who was convicted after prosecutors failed to turn over blood evidence, was “not just wrong but egregiously so.”  At the New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen discusses why the Court’s most recent Term “would have looked very different if Justice Sandra Day O’Connor were still on the bench.”  And after briefly reviewing some of the Court’s major decisions, the editorial board of the New York Times urges the Court to “address doubts about the court’s legitimacy by making themselves accountable to the code of conduct [of the rest of the federal judiciary].  That would make their rulings more likely to be seen as separate from politics and, as a result, convincing as law.”  

Briefly: 

• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler discusses Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which the Court recently granted cert. 
• At the WSJ Law Blog, Nathan Koppel reports on the Court’s denial of cert. in the Philip Morris case, in which Justice Scalia had issued a stay of the $270 million verdict last fall.