Thursday round-up
on Nov 15, 2012 at 9:34 am
With the Court between oral argument sittings, yesterday’s coverage looks ahead to cases and cert. petitions the Court will review in the coming months.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Nathaniel Persily dissects the issues in Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Court will consider the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act; he suggests that “a perverse outcome of the 2012 campaign may be that President Obama’s victory spells doom for the civil rights law most responsible for African-American enfranchisement.” At The Nation, Brentin Mock also weighs in on the grant, arguing that “[a]ll that matters is that [the case] is being made before Chief Justice John Roberts’ Supreme Court, which has shown no sympathy, if not shown flat-out resentment, for laws they believe support racial preference.” And in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Scott Douglas Gerber suggests that with the grant in Shelby County, “the current term also became [Justice] Thomas’s best chance for leaving a lasting legacy on American law.”
At her “On the Case” blog for Thomson Reuters, Alison Frankel discusses the pending cert. petition in Merck & Co. v. Louisiana Wholesale Drug Company, Inc., which asks the Court to decide whether federal antitrust laws permit a brand-name manufacturer holding a drug patent to settle a patent suit with a prospective generic manufacturer, where the settlement includes a payment from the former to the latter but does not exclude competition beyond the scope of the patent. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys work for or contribute to this blog in various capacities, serves as co-counsel to the respondents in this case.]
Court coverage also included a look back at cases already argued but not yet decided this Term. At the Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, Eric Weddle reports on an amicus brief filed by Purdue and Indiana Universities in support of the University of Texas in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. (Thanks to Howard Bashman for the link.) And at Forbes, Michael Bobelian discusses Comcast v. Behrend and Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, two cases involving class action procedural questions that, as Bobelian notes, “could represent important decisions for large corporations, which are the typical defendants in class actions.” Finally, at Reason, Scott Shackford discusses this week’s denial of cert. in Shaygan v. United States, a case involving a federal law that allows judges to sanction prosecutors for taking positions that are “vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith.”
Briefly:
- In a legal scholarship highlight for this blog, Ray Brescia summaries his study assessing the impact of Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic v. Twombly on practice in the lower court, “particularly their effect on civil rights cases.”
- Writing for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse examines two developments during the election season that she believes will affect the nine Justices: “the vote in four states in support of same-sex marriage, and the run-up to Election Day that saw both Democrats and federal judges pushing back against Republican strategies devised to selectively minimize voter turnout.”
