Round-Up

At Slate, Cullen Seltzer writes this defense of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that its “extra-high rate of review and reversal by the Supreme Court” deserves a more complex explanation than just that it is “populated by a bunch of loose cannon, lefty judges.”

Commentary on and criticism of the school integration decision continues. Law professor Leonard Baynes concludes at the end of his article in Jurist that the majority’s decision in the Seattle and Louisville cases was “immoral,” because it failed to “take into account the historic reality that segregation played (and still plays) in our society.” Guest columnist to the New York Times, Stanley Fish, suggests in this column that the real issue underlying the decision is “whether the Court should be attentive to history and the societal consequences of its decision, or should it turn a blind eye to those consequences and attend only to the principled protection of individual rights” (subscription req’d).

A summary of next term’s New York State Board of Elections v. Lopez Torres, the first ballot access case since 1992 to be heard by the Supreme Court, can be found here.

Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer had a brief Supreme Court quiz. Here’s both the Court-based questions and answers.