Friday round-up

By Adam Chandler
on Nov 19, 2010 at 9:22 am

In brief, here are today’s stories on the Court:

• At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick discusses several recent events that raised ethical questions for the Justices this year, and she urges the Court to “clarify, as a group, what’s permissible and what isn’t” when it comes to partisan political activity.

• In an opinion piece for Politico, former judges Abner Mikva and Timothy Lewis argue that the Senate’s “failure to consider nominations has exacerbated a vacancy crisis for our federal courts that has reached critical proportions.”

• In her Opinionator column for the New York Times, Linda Greenhouse addresses critics of federal court rulings on national security, countering that (and explaining why, in her view) such criticism is “deeply misguided.”

• BNA (subscription required) has a report on the cert. petition in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett (one of SCOTUSblog’s petitions of the day on October 22). The petition presents a challenge to Arizona’s “clean elections” public financing system. The Justices will consider it at next Tuesday’s conference.  (Thanks to Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog for the link. Hasen is “pretty confident we’ll see a cert grant.”)