Round-Up

The most recent edition of the New Yorker features this commentary by Nicholas Lemann, in which he maintains that “the President has achieved one wholesale change that will likely endure for a generation: the construction of a distinctly right-wing Supreme Court.” Lemann then goes on to detail the history of desegregation in America, concluding with this term’s Parents Involved decision.

Here at her blog, Legalities, Jan Crawford Greenburg criticizes both the left and the right for some of their observations this term, going so far as to describe some liberal commentary as being “almost breathtaking in its over-the-top hysteria,” and she calls on commentators to “have an honest debate about what the Court actually did — and what that actually will mean.”

Stephen E. Abraham, “the first military insider to criticize publicly the Guantanamo hearings,” is profiled here in a New York Times article today by William Glaberson. It has been argued by some lawyers, according to Glaberson, that Abraham’s criticism played an important role in the Supreme Court’s unusual decision to reverse itself and hear the Guantanamo detainees’ cases.