Thursday round-up
on Jan 24, 2013 at 9:44 am
Yesterday’s coverage continued to focus on the opening briefs in the same-sex marriage cases, Hollingsworth v. Perry (the challenge to California’s Proposition 8), and United States v. Windsor (the challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act). Coverage of the brief in support of Proposition 8 comes from Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle, Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed, and Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy. Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic argues that Prop. 8’s backers “finally have laid out the best version of their argument,” while Damon W. Root of Reason.com argues that the brief relies on the “dubious left-wing legal argument” that states should function as the laboratories of democracy. Coverage of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group’s brief in support of DOMA comes from Erin Fuchs of Business Insider and Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed.
Other coverage focuses on Justice Thomas’s remarks during oral argument in Boyer v. Louisiana, his first in seven years, after the Court released a revised transcript of the argument. Coverage of the joke, which appears to have been at the expense of Harvard Law School, comes from Robert Barnes of The Washington Post, Ariane de Vogue of ABC News, and Jonathan Stempel of Reuters.
On Tuesday, the Brennan Center at NYU and the Constitutional Accountability Center filed an amicus brief in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., urging the Court to affirm the Ninth Circuit’s decision striking down an Arizona law requiring persons registering to vote to show documents proving that they are eligible to vote. Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog has coverage; in separate posts, he notes that the Solicitor General’s office has asked for argument time in the case, and that the Court denied a motion to correct the case caption.
Briefly:
- Linda Greenhouse marks the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade in her Opinionator column for The New York Times.
- Coverage of Justice Sotomayor’s book tour continues, with Jody Serrano of the Austin American-Statesman reporting on her recent stop in Austin.
- The Owners’ Rights Initiative has released a video showing how members of the public react to the possibility that copyright holders could block the importation of copyrighted materials legally made abroad, an issue currently before the Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- J.D. Tucille of Reason Magazine’s Hit & Run blog argues that licensing gun owners would likely be unconstitutional under the Court’s Second Amendment precedents.
