Tuesday round-up
on Apr 28, 2015 at 5:47 am
After much anticipation, this morning at 10 a.m. the Court will hear two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments in the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage. I previewed the case in Plain English (in Part I and Part II), with other coverage coming from Nina Totenberg of NPR, who has posts previewing the case and one on the amicus briefs that have filed, Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News, Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), and David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, who describes Justice Kennedy as “poised to be the crucial vote in deciding whether gay marriage will be a constitutional right nationwide.” Richard Wolf of USA Today reports on the road to the Court for the same-sex marriage issue and profiles Mary Bonauto, one of the lawyers who will argue on behalf of the plaintiffs tomorrow.
Commentary on the cases and oral arguments come from Noah Feldman for Bloomberg View, Marci Hamilton at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, David Gans at the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Text and History Blog, Eric Segall at ACSblog, John Culhane at Politico Magazine, Bob Tuttle and Ira Lupu at Cornerstone, Adam Winkler at ACSblog, Joseph Mansilla at Adventures in Doctrinal Wonderland, David Upham at The Public Discourse, Karl Laird at Oxford Human Rights Hub, Tom Watts (with Part 2 and Part 3 of a series) at the Harvard Law and Policy Review, and Kenneth Jost (in two posts) at Jost on Justice.
Yesterday the Court granted review in two cases. Lyle Denniston covered the orders from last week’s Conference for this blog, while Kimberly Bennett did the same for JURIST. At Mayer Brown’s Class Defense Blog, Andrew Pincus and others discuss the grant in Spokeo Inc. v. Robins, in which the Court will consider “whether Congress may confer Article III standing by authorizing a private right of action based on a bare violation of a federal statute, even though the plaintiff has not suffered any concrete harm.” And at his eponymous blog, Ross Runkel discusses the grant in Green v. Donahoe, in which the Court will consider time limits for workplace grievances claiming a “constructive discharge” of a federal employee. In another post, Runkel discusses the order to the California attorney general to file a response in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, describing the case as “a big deal because it is a head-on challenge of the 1977 Abood decision which upheld a state statute that allows an ‘agency shop’ arrangement.”
The Court also relisted O’Keefe v. Chisholm. As M.D. Kittle of the Wisconsin Watchdog reports, the case “aims to revive a civil rights complaint against the prosecutors of Wisconsin’s political John Doe investigation into dozens of conservative groups and the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker.” Other coverage comes from Jason Stein at the Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, while commentary comes from Roger Pilon at Cato at Liberty, Eugene Volokh for The Washington Post, William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, Rick Hasen at his Election Law Blog, and from Rick Esenberg at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Right Wisconsin (with another post here).
After issuing orders, the Court heard oral arguments in Kingsley v. Hendrickson, involving excessive force and pre-trial detainees. Richard Re covered the oral argument for this blog, with other coverage coming from Kimberly Bennett of JURIST and commentary from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate.
Briefly:
- In an op-ed in The National Law Journal (subscription required), Megan McCracken and Jennifer Moreno weigh in on tomorrow’s challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, arguing that “[t]he facts learned after the executions of Dennis McGuire, Clayton Lockett and Joseph Wood, and the undisputed scientific data, require the court to now say that the use of midazolam violates the Eighth Amendment.”
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