Friday round-up

Briefly:

• In The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen argues that, “[d]espite its turn to the right on gun control, the Supreme Court should almost certainly uphold any of the new regulations that have a chance of being enacted, according to the logic of its decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago.”
• Business Insider‘s Erin Fuchs lists the “5 Supreme Court Cases That Could Change The Lives Of Americans.”
• At CNN.com, Jeffrey Toobin previews some of the major issues confronting the courts in 2013 – including the same-sex marriage cases at the Supreme Court.
• In The New York Times (via The Texas Tribune), Maurice Chammah reports on the case of Texas death row inmate Max Soffar, who recently filed a cert. petition asking the Court to weigh in on whether the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals “has an effective standard for judging whether his trial lawyer . . . represented him adequately in the 2006 trial.”
• At The Originalism Blog, Chris Green discusses whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group has standing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor and notes that “[t]he history of courts inquiring into the merits of a case, even when only one side appears, is at least as old as Marbury v. Madison, in which Madison did not appear.”
• Coverage of Justice Sotomayor’s refusal to block the enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate (on which Lyle reported on Wednesday) continued, with a post by Sahil Kapur for Talking Points Memo.
• At PrawfsBlawg, Paul Horwitz responds to Linda Greenhouse’s column for the New York Times, which Cormac covered in yesterday’s round-up.
• C-SPAN Radio concludes its week-long series on Supreme Court oral arguments by current Justices, before they were appointed to the bench.  Today’s segment includes Justice Scalia’s argument while he was Assistant Attorney General and an argument by Chief Justice Roberts, appearing as a friend of the Court.
• At a speech last night in Naples, Florida, retired Justice John Paul Stevens touched on a variety of topics that included Bush v. Gore, the death penalty, and gun control.  Jacob Carpenter reports on the event for the Naples Daily News.  (h/t Howard Bashman at How Appealing)