Thursday round-up
on Oct 31, 2013 at 7:58 am
In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse uses recent comments by Judge Richard Posner about his decision upholding Indiana’s voter identification law (which the Court, in an opinion by now-retired Justice John Paul Stevens, affirmed) as a jumping-off point to discuss how judges – including the Justices of the Supreme Court – “learn what they need to know” and “choose what to make of the knowledge that they have.”
On Tuesday, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor officiated at a same-sex wedding ceremony at the Court (an event that I covered in yesterday’s round-up). As Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal, don’t look for Justice Anthony Kennedy to be performing any weddings – for same- or opposite-sex couples – in the days ahead: Kennedy told an audience he doesn’t “do weddings” because of his “theory that federal judges can’t take authority from state laws.”
In an op-ed for Forbes, Paul Sherman urges the Court to grant cert. in Worley v. Florida Secretary of State, a challenge to a Florida campaign finance law that defines who must comply with the state’s rules for “political committees.” Sherman – who works at the Institute for Justice, which represents the challengers in the case – argues that the state’s regulations “make spontaneous political speech effectively impossible for ad hoc, grassroots groups.”
