End-of-the-week round-up

KALI BORKOSKI SEP 25, 2010 9:59 AM

In her column yesterday for the Opinionator blog of the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse raises a “standing alert,” arguing that “recent developments of potentially great consequence” in areas such as health care litigation and stem cell research “are pushing the question of standing to the forefront in a way that promises to make it one of the hot legal topics of the coming months or even years.”  At the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Ashby Jones describes Greenhouse’s column as “an interesting one” that “raises an interesting question” regarding how some Justices on the Court might deal with the standing issue “if and when it’s wrapped in the clothing of a challenge to President Obama’s health-care law.”

Yesterday Senate Republicans blocked the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that was intended as a response to the Court’s January decision in Citizens United and that would have required businesses, unions, and other special-interest groups to disclose their donors.  At ACSblog, Public Citizen’s Taylor Lincoln discusses Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United and, in his view, “how much the opinion relied on the promise of disclosure.”  And U.S. News and World Report hosts a debate on whether the Court’s decision in Citizens United is “hurting democracy.”

Harris Interactive recently released the results of a new poll on the Supreme Court and confirmation process.  Among other things, sixty-nine percent indicated that the Court “is a crucial governing body for the success of the United States.”  In response, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog’s Ashby Jones wonders whether that statistic also indicates that “nearly one out of three Americans think the country would be okay without the U.S. Supreme Court?” Mark Cohen, writing for the MinnLawyer Blog of the Minnesota Lawyer, similarly interprets the poll as indicating that “31 percent . . . apparently think that the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. could be better utilized as say, a parking garage, or perhaps a movie theather.”  Newsblaze reports on the poll results in detail, while UPI also discusses the pool.

Briefly:

• Looking forward to the opening of the new T erm, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg Business considers the effect that Justice Kagan’s recusal may have on the outcome of some important cases at the Court this Term.

• At PrawfsBlawg, Lior Strahilevitz looks at NASA v. Nelson – the “first constitutional right to information privacy case in a generation,” which will be argued on October 5.

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