Tuesday round-up
Yesterday the Court issued its decision in the copyright case Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, holding that the movie studio cannot invoke the doctrine of laches as a bar to the pursuit of a claim for damages brought within the three-year window established by Section 507(b) of the Copyright Act. Ronald Mann covered the decision for this blog; other coverage comes from Nina Totenberg of NPR and Daniel Fisher of Forbes.
Briefly:
- Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News observes that, “two years after the court upheld President Barack Obama’s health-care law and a year after it bolstered gay rights, the five Republican-appointed justices are voting together again in the highest-profile cases.”
- In a guest post at The Monkey Cage, L.J. Zigerell argues that “there is good reason to temper any expectations” that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer will retire before the end of President Obama’s second term.
- In a post at ACSblog, Frederick Gedicks discusses Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate opinion in Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which the Court upheld a New York town’s practice of beginning its town council meetings with a prayer. In Thomas’s view, the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause does not apply at all to the states and local governments; Gedicks counters that, “[o]nce one understands that the Establishment Clause protected personal liberty from federal religious establishments, as well as state power over state religious establishment or disestablishment, the logical and textual foundation for its application to the states becomes obvious.”
- At Switchboard, the staff blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council, David Doniger explains why, if the Court’s upcoming decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA “curtails EPA’s permitting rules in any way,” the resulting “flurry of press releases claiming the decision casts doubt on EPA’s power plant standards . . . will be wrong.”
- In The New York Review of Books, Cass Sunstein reviews Six Amendments, the new book by retired Justice John Paul Stevens.
- At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re examines the Court’s apparent recent practice of granting only cases that it has relisted at least one time; he suggests that one possible reason for this change is “that the Court has diminished confidence in adversity at the cert stage.”
- At the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Liberty Blog, Tony Francois discusses the amicus brief that PLF filed in support of a cert. petition filed by a California oyster farm.
- At Angry Bear, Beverly Mann praises what she describes as “a growing public awareness and concern about the ‘attitudinal model’ of Supreme Court votes.”
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