Friday round-up
on Mar 28, 2014 at 8:56 am
Commentary on the challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate continues to dominate Court-related news. At Big Think, Steven Mazie discusses what he describes as the alliance of “strange bedfellows” supporting Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, the challengers in the case, while at Balkinization David Gans urges the Court to “recognize that the rights of Hobby Lobby’s thousands of employees – who have deeply held beliefs and convictions of their own – are at stake here, too.” At First Things, Travis Weber urges the Court to strike down the mandate, arguing that it “puts the jobs, livelihoods, and healthcare of millions of Americans at risk by forcing those who stand up for their consciences to choose between paying crippling fines that could shut down their businesses or dropping the healthcare of their employees.” David Cortman echoes these arguments in an op-ed for The Washington Times, in which he writes that, “[i]f the government’s mandate is allowed to stand, people might be out of a job, have no insurance coverage and have less or no money to pay for these items should they choose to buy them.” At The Volokh Conspiracy, Michael McConnell weighs in on some of the legal questions raised at Tuesday’s oral argument; he concludes by predicting that, in “the cold light of legal principle, the challenge to the contraceptive mandate will carry the day.” And at Forbes, Trevor Burrus cautions that supporters of the mandate “who are opposing Hobby Lobby’s suit as an attempt to undercut women’s rights or as an attempt to let your boss choose your health care, should be thinking instead about the next big government mandate that could affect a business’s right of conscience that they actually care about.”
Briefly:
- At Fortune, Roger Parloff previews next week’s oral arguments in Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank International, in which the Court will consider whether the Patent Act authorizes patents on software – more specifically, on computer-implemented inventions. (Ronald Mann previewed the case for this blog earlier this month.)
