Tuesday round-up

By Kiran Bhat
on Sep 25, 2012 at 9:14 am

As Kali Borkoski of this blog notes, the Justices met yesterday for their “Long Conference” to consider petitions from the summer lists. Consistent with the new procedure for releasing orders, on which Lyle Denniston of this blog reported yesterday, we expect the Court to issue any grants from that Conference at 9:30 a.m. and will report on the grants (as well as any other actions taken on the order list) as soon as possible.

Briefly:

• Susan Decker and Greg Stohr of Bloomberg report on the settlement of a patent dispute between Star Scientific Inc. and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., which the Justices had been slated to consider during their Conference yesterday.
• Mark Walsh of the ABA Journal previews the upcoming Term, with extra attention paid to Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.
• Also at the ABA Journal, Bryan Garner publishes the first portion of a two-part “textualist quiz” that was omitted from the book Garner coauthored with Justice Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.
• In a legal scholarship highlight for this blog, Carl Cecere and Lorianne Updike Toler discuss their article examining the early Court’s use of various theories of constitutional interpretation, “Originalist and Non-Originalist alike.”
• As protests against a derogatory anti-Islam YouTube video continue around the Muslim world, Michael Kirkland of UPI reviews some of the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence and concludes that “Court decisions in the last few decades do not bode well for any government attempt to control or suppress expressive speech, even when the average American might find that speech repellent.”
• At Sentencing Law and Policy, Douglas A. Berman focuses on several petitions of topical interest on this blog’s lists of “Petitions to Watch” (which are here, here, and here).
• Michael Graczyk of the Associated Press (via the Providence Journal) and Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times report that Cleve Foster, whom Texas plans to execute today, will ask the Court for a fourth stay of his execution.
• At the Huffington Post, Mary Price discusses the case of Sholom Rubashkin, whose petition for certiorari the Justices considered yesterday.  Rubashkin was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison after “federal prosecutors transformed one count of bank fraud into more than 90 counts by the time the case went to trial.”
• In the New York Review of Books, retired Justice John Paul Stevens reviews Sanford Levinson’s book Framed: America’s Fifty-One Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance. (Thanks to Howard Bashman of How Appealing for the link.)
• In honor of the anniversary of the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1789, Scott Bomboy (writing at the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Daily blog) takes “a look back at the first court” and finds “personal drama that included a justice dodging credits, a failed suicide attempt and a Chief Justice who was America’s most-hated man, for a time.”
• David H. Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center contends that the Voting Rights Act and its “preclearance” requirement, at issue in the petition Shelby County v. Holder, are clearly constitutional.
• At his eponymous blog Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost argues that after a recent decision by the Sixth Circuit upholding a conviction that relied on the use of cell phone data to track a suspected drug dealer, “protecting cell phone privacy will be up to the courts, including, ultimately, the Supreme Court.”
• Michael Muskal of the Los Angeles Times reports on South Carolina’s efforts to defend its voter identification law before a three-judge panel yesterday, noting that the Court “is expected to be asked to consider an appeal, regardless of which side wins” below.
• In light of the Court’s June decision in United States v. Alvarez, invalidating the federal Stolen Valor Act, the editorial board of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press (via the Chicago Tribune) weighs in on legislation (recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives) which would criminalize lying about military awards for pecuniary gain, as well as the creation of an online database of military award winners.
• Moriah Balingit of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that other states are following how Pennsylvania will comply with the Court’s recent ruling in Miller v. Alabama, holding that life sentences without the possibility of parole for juvenile offenders are unconstitutional.
• Following up on a story from yesterday’s round-up, Sam Favate of the WSJ Law Blog and Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal have additional coverage of Justice Thomas’s remarks about law school rankings.