Thursday round-up

By Nabiha Syed
on Dec 16, 2010 at 10:46 am

As the holidays approach, coverage of the Court looks forward to what the 2011 may bring.

Coverage of health-care reform continues, as Adam mentioned in yesterday’s round-up. At NPR, former Solicitors General Paul Clement and Walter Dellinger discuss the constitutional issues facing the Affordable Care Act, and both conclude that the “only way it stops short of the Supreme Court is if every court of appeals that hears this case  . . . upheld the law.” In an opinion piece for CNN, Richard Bonnie contends that the healthcare law would only be overturned if “five justices on the Supreme Court decide to disavow settled law”; similarly, at the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog, Luke Norris asserts that a ruling that health-care reform is unconstitutional “would not only challenge nearly a century of precedent, but would threaten to pull away the very foundations of security that Americans have built over the last century.” Clive Crook of The Atlantic believes that the Justices will defer to the political branches, while Newsweek considers whether “Justice Samuel Alito or Chief Justice John Roberts, both appointed by George W. Bush, might be even harder [for challengers of the law] to win over than Kennedy because Alito and Roberts are usually deferential to government power.” The story continues to unfold, as the battle now moves to a federal court in Florida.  The Christian Science Monitor has coverage of the case and discusses how the current Court might approach the challenges. Lyle Denniston of this blog reports that the Obama Administration will not seek immediate Supreme Court review of the Virginia case decided earlier this week.

At Time, Adam Cohen takes a look at Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, in which the Court will hear oral argument next month.  Cohen argues that the case, which considers whether corporations have personal privacy rights, “demonstrates the disturbing lengths to which courts are now going to create new rights for corporations.”

Briefly:

• Claude Marx reviews Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman’s book on the constitutional battles of the Roosevelt era, Scorpions, for the Boston Globe.
• The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times decries the recent decision in Costco v. Omega, in which an equally divided Court affirmed a Ninth Circuit decision that limited the first-sale doctrine to items made in the United States.