Friday round-up

RACHEL SACHS FEB 8, 2013 8:16 AM

Thursday’s coverage of the Court primarily looked ahead to some of the high-profile cases still to be argued this Term.  In Shelby County v. Holder, scheduled for oral argument on February 27, the Court will consider the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act; at The Nation, Ari Berman examines the history of the Act and the challenges to it, while at ACSblog Jeremy Leaming summarizes some of the amicus briefs filed in defense of the Act.  Also at The Nation, Nan Hunter discusses the briefs filed so far in the same-sex marriage cases, Hollingsworth v. Perry (Proposition 8) and United States v. Windsor (DOMA), and reaches the “surprising conclusion” that “the gay marriage debate is really all about heterosexuals.”

Briefly:

• This blog continued its symposium on the gene patenting issue presented in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., with one post by Susan McBee and Bryan Jones and another by Andrew Torrance.
• At Patent Docs, Donald Zuhn summarizes the amicus brief filed before the Court by the Washington Legal Foundation in Bowman v. Monsanto, in which the Court is considering the applicability of the doctrine of patent exhaustion to self-replicating technologies.
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost reviews Justice Sotomayor’s new memoir, My Beloved World.
• In advance of President Obama’s State of the Union address next Tuesday, Bill Mears of CNN looks at the Justices’ evolving tradition of attendance at the speech.

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