Monday round-up

By Amanda Rice
on Aug 23, 2010 at 9:37 am

At the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott discusses a resolution, recently introduced by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), “calling on the Supreme Court to reopen the iconic [front] doors,” which were closed in early May for security reasons.  Kennicott suggests this resolution could “be the beginning of a new conversation” about “the public’s role in making security decisions.” At his eponymous blog, Josh Blackman ponders whether “Congress could order the Court to open the door,” and he observes that the resolution raises “interesting separation of powers issues.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor are both scheduled to speak at the Tenth Circuit Judicial Conference in Colorado Springs next weekend.  Both the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Associated Press have coverage; the Gazette also reports that Justice Ginsburg will read a speech titled “How the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals got my wife her good job,” which her late husband had intended to give.

Briefly:

• Last term in Salazar v. Buono, the Court allowed a six-and-a-half-foot cross to remain in the Mojave National Preserve pending further litigation in the lower courts about a congressional proposal to redesignate the land on which the cross stood as private property. However, Robert Barnes of the Washington Post now reports that the cross at issue in the case has been removed and considers whether, “[i]f there’s no cross, is there still a case?”
• At the BLT, Jeff Jeffrey discusses a cert. petition filed by Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in a contract dispute between the firm and a former partner.
• At the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein considers whether and to what extent the Supreme Court should defer to Congress’s assessment of the constitutionality of its laws in the context of the new health care law.
• Michael Kirkland of UPI considers how the current Court might view challenges to affirmative action and concludes that such programs “may be living on borrowed time.”