Thursday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Aug 15, 2013 at 7:20 am

As Lyle reported yesterday for this blog, the California Supreme Court has declined to revive that state’s ban on same-sex marriage – the measure at the center of last Term’s decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the ban’s defenders lacked the legal right to defend it on appeal.  Other coverage of the California court’s order comes from Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times and Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed.

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied rehearing in a challenge to the constitutionality of the “birth control mandate” – a provision in the Affordable Care Act which requires employers to provide their employees with health insurance that includes access to family planning.  Attorneys for the Pennsylvania company challenging the mandate have already announced that they will ask the Supreme Court to weigh in.  Lyle Denniston covers these developments for this blog; other coverage comes from Sam Baker of The Hill.

Briefly:

• At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen posts the cert. petition in Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, a challenge to an Ohio law which criminalizes false statements in political campaigns.
• At Slate, Emily Bazelon criticizes the Court’s decision to deny cert. in Scott v. Saint John’s Church in the Wilderness, in which it had been asked to consider whether, to protect children, the government may restrict the public display of gruesome images; the Court denied rehearing in the case earlier this week.
• Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the South Carolina couple who have been awarded custody of Baby Veronica, the child at the heart of last Term’s Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, have traveled to Oklahoma in an effort to reach a compromise with the child’s biological family there.  The state’s governor has urged the child’s biological father to cooperate with the Capobiancos and warned him that she could otherwise expedite his extradition to South Carolina, where he faces custody interference charges.  The Associated Press has the story.

Disclosure: Tejinder Singh of the law firm of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, was among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Perry.  However, the author of this post is not affiliated with the law firm.