Wednesday round-up
Briefly:
- In The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin discusses the “undue burden” standard for laws regulating abortion, which he characterizes as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s “most important triumph during her long and consequential tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court,” and whether that standard will survive if challenges to a Texas law requiring abortions to be performed in ambulatory surgical centers come to the Court.
- In an op-ed for The National Law Journal (registration or subscription required), Ron Honberg urges the Court to grant the petition for certiorari filed by Texas death row inmate Scott Panetti and “announce a precise standard for assessing a prisoner’s competency for execution.”
- Ben Winslow of Fox13 News in Salt Lake City reports that a federal judge has relied on the Court’s decision last June in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, holding that the application of the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate to closely held corporations with strong religious beliefs violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to rule that “a member of the Fundamentalist LDS Church does not have to answer questions about child labor violations.”
- Chantal Valery of Agence France-Presse (via Business Insider) reports on the recent announcement that the Court will review all seven pending same-sex marriage petitions at its September 29 Conference; she observes that, “[w]hether for or against gay marriage, concerned US parties seem to be forming a consensus on at least one point: it’s time for the Supreme Court to decide.”
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