Friday round-up
With the oral arguments (now expanded to ninety minutes) in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate less than a week away, the two cases are the subject of extensive coverage and commentary. Lyle Denniston previewed the cases for this blog; other coverage comes from Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News and Richard Wolf of USA Today. Commentary supporting the two families challenging the mandate comes from Matt Bowman (who represents the Hahn family in Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius) at the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse blog; arguments on the other side come from Caroline Mala Corbin at ACSblog and Robin Radner at legalfeet.
Briefly:
- At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick weighs in on what she describes as the most recent “tussle in the altogether imaginary public battle over Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s future at the Supreme Court,” arguing that “[i]t’s perverse in the extreme to seek to bench Ginsburg the fighter, simply because Senate Democrats are unwilling or unable to fight for the next Ginsburg.”
- At Reason.com’s Hit and Run Blog, Damon Root responds to an article by David Savage for the Los Angeles Times (which I covered in yesterday’s round-up) on the “wave of free speech cases” brought by conservatives. Root suggests that “First Amendment cases often fail to conform to a binary left-right divide, and that’s because both sides of the political spectrum are willing to accept the use of government power to silence certain voices at certain times.”
- In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports on Elane Photography v. Willock, in which a New Mexico couple is asking the Court to weigh in on whether they can be required to take photographs of a same-sex commitment ceremony, even if it would violate their First Amendment rights.
- At Forbes, Daniel Fisher previews next week’s oral argument in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, which he describes as a “lawsuit that will decide the future of software patents. Or not.” (Ronald Mann previewed the case for this blog yesterday.)
- In the wake of last year’s decision in Maryland v. King, in which the Court upheld a Maryland law that required police to take DNA samples from anyone arrested for a serious offense, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has rejected a challenge to a similar California law. Howard Mintz has the story for the San Jose Mercury News.
- In the Rutgers Journal of Law & Public Policy, Jordan Hollander discusses the cert. petition filed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has asked the Court to review a federal law that prohibits most states, including New Jersey, from licensing or authorizing sports gambling.
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