Tuesday round-up

By Joshua Matz
on Aug 30, 2011 at 9:16 am

The future of conservatism on the Court, a popular topic this past Term, continues to draw attention. Walter Russell Meads of The American Interest responds to Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker article on Justice Thomas (which Kiera covered in last week’s round-up); he characterizes the article as an announcement “to the liberal world that Clarence Thomas has morphed from a comic figure of fun to a determined super-villain who might reverse seventy years of liberal dominance of the federal bench and turn the clock back to 1930 if not 1789.” And writing at Dorf on Law, Michael Dorf suggests that Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, in which the Court held that several provisions of an Arizona statute which permit the suspension or revocation of the business license of Arizona employers who knowingly and intentionally employ unauthorized aliens are not preempted by federal law, may signal the “the beginning of a larger political realignment” within conservatism toward a populist rather than pro-business position.

Also, SCOTUSblog’s symposium on same-sex marriage added four posts on Monday, from Andrew Koppelman of Northwestern University, Jana Singer of the University of Maryland, Robin Wilson of Washington and Lee University, and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Irvine. The entire symposium can be found here.

Briefly:

• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost discusses a recent decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court that orders “sweeping new changes in the state’s court system to control the use of often unreliable eyewitness testimony.” Turning to next Term’s eyewitness testimony case at the Court – Perry v. New Hampshire – Jost argues that, although the “Roberts Court majority is hardly inclined to establish safeguards to protect defendants’ rights,” “all the justices ought to have an interest in ensuring the reliability of testimony used in criminal cases.” [Disclosure: The author of this post assisted with research for the merits brief on behalf of the petitioner in Perry.]

• Nathan Koppel reports at the WSJ Law Blog about a dispute over whether a federal court should unseal video recordings of last year’s Proposition 8 trial in California. Although some media groups and the plaintiffs’ lawyers want the tapes to be made public, “proponents of Prop. 8 want the videos to remain sealed, contending that airing the footage would violate a U.S. Supreme Court ruling barring cameras from covering the Prop. 8 case.”

• Writing at CATO@Liberty, Ilya Shapiro responds to Professor Laurence H. Tribe’s contribution to the SCOTUSblog ACA symposium (the whole symposium can be found here).