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Thursday round-up

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on Sep 16, 2010 at 11:37 am
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The prospect of cameras at the Supreme Court is once again back in the news, thanks to Tony Mauro’s interview (for the National Law Journal) with Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who is the sponsor of two pending bills, one of which would require the Court to allow cameras while the other would merely encourage them.  Both bills were voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, and Specter told Mauro that he now plans to push for the mandatory bill. Ashby Jones of the WSJ Law Blog discusses the interview and ties Specter’s efforts to a larger movement to put cameras in federal courts – a movement that he characterizes as having gained “a bit of momentum” of late. And in the USA Today, Joan Biskupic reports on a pilot project approved this week by the U.S. Judicial Conference that would allow video recording of some federal civil trials; she highlights Specter’s suggestion that the plan “fails to address ‘the real core’ issue of the closed federal judiciary” because it will not affect the Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, Justice Breyer weighed in on the issue of cameras in the courtroom at a town-hall-style meeting in Los Angeles in which he also discussed the influence of politics on the Court. Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times and Jon Wiener of The Nation have coverage.

At Cato @ Liberty, Ilya Shapiro argues that the Court should review a recent Montana Supreme Court navigable waters decision “for possible Takings Clause violations under the Fifth Amendment.” Discussing the case, Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy adds that “[i]f the Supreme Court takes this case, it may be less willing to grant broad discretion to state courts . . . because the relevant state law doctrine (the definition of “navigable”) is derived from federal law.”

Briefly:

  • At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick parses Justice Breyer’s remarks about Quran-burning and the First Amendment (which Kali covered in yesterday’s round-up). She concludes that, “[i]f they signify anything, Breyer’s strange musings about Quran burning illustrate the danger of allowing Supreme Court justices to go on live television for their book tours.”

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