Friday round-up
Yesterday a federal district judge sent Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk, to jail after she continued to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after the Supreme Court declined to stay the judge’s ruling ordering her to do so. Lyle Denniston covered the latest developments for this blog, with other commentary coming from Howard Wasserman in two posts at PrawfsBlawg, Steven Mazie for The Economist, and Robin Wilson at the Illinois Law Faculty Blog.
In the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that a recent study on “the stock market impact of Supreme Court decisions over the past 15 years shows that a significant number of decided cases—one in 20—‘move markets’ when they are handed down, demonstrating that the court’s opinions have ramifications beyond the concerns of lawyers and legislators.” Nicole Hong also covers the study for The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.
Yesterday a group of Texas abortion clinics and doctors filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review several provisions of that state’s 2013 law placing new restrictions on abortions. Lyle Denniston covers the filing for this blog; commentary comes from Helen Knowles, who at MSNBC writes that the petition “suggests that the new session will once again revolve around Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose swing vote was critical last June to extending the right to marry to gay couples across the United States.”
Briefly:
- Elsewhere in the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Mauro reviews Sisters in Law, Linda Hirshman’s new book on Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
- At PrawfsBlawg, Rick Garnett remembers the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died ten years ago yesterday.
- In The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin reports that, in the wake of the church shootings earlier this year in Charleston, lawmakers in a Maryland city have “indicated they are ready to remove a bust of” Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, the author of the Court’s Dred Scott decision, “that sits at City Hall’s entrance, after beating back similar proposals in previous decades.”
- In an op-ed for The Washington Post, C. Boyden Gray discusses the case of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, whose application to stay out of prison pending the Court’s disposition of his appeal was granted, and expresses hope that “this initial order reflects the court’s interest in paring back prosecutors’ dangerously overbroad reading of the law.”
- At Cato at Liberty, Ilya Shapiro and Randal Meyer discuss the amicus brief that Cato filed in support of certiorari in a case arising out of the California attorney general’s request that “the Center for Competitive Politics (CCP), an educational foundation and public-interest law firm specializing in the First Amendment and political law, disclose its principal donors to the state.”
- In a post at the Petri-Flom Center’s Bill of Health Blog, Greg Lipper analyzes (and criticizes) the arguments made by the Cato Institute in its amicus brief in the challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor to the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate.
- In The National Law Review, G. Christopher Meyer looks at the impact of last Term’s decision in Baker Botts v. ASARCO, in which the Court “held that a professional could not recover for the fees it incurred in defending against objections to its fee application.”
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
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