Monday round-up
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared in New York last week to discuss former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) covered the speech, reporting that it was “a lecture less about law–not a single one of Hughes’s opinions was discussed–than about leadership, the peculiar kind that a chief justice can, with sufficient dexterity, exercise in a role that gives him no direct power over his fellow justices and, by tradition, a muted place in the political dialogue.” Other coverage comes from Ariane de Vogue of CNN, who similarly reports that Roberts “revealed his deep understanding of the court’s history but also his thoughts on the role of the chief justice, its limits and opportunities for leadership, and why no one on the current court will ever run for president.”
Briefly:
- At his eponymous blog and at this blog, Lyle Denniston reports on a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denying en banc review of a challenge to the National Security Agency’s telephone data sweeps program; the challengers have announced that they intend to seek Supreme Court review.
- In The Yale Law Journal’s online forum, Ryan Whalen “analyzes the readability of over six thousand Supreme Court opinions by measuring the length of sentences and the use of long, polysyllabic words” and concludes that “legal writing at the Court has become more complex and difficult to read in recent decades.”
- At Bloomberg BNA’s U.S. Law Week Blog, Patrick Gregory reports on a petition for certiorari filed by a law school graduate who “has close to $300,000 in law school debt and is seeking the U.S. Supreme Court’s help in getting it discharged in bankruptcy.”
- A post at the Cato Institute’s Legal Briefs discusses the amicus brief that Cato filed in support of AIG, which is seeking review of a Second Circuit decision denying the company a foreign-tax credit.
- On Saturday, November 28, C-Span Radio will air the first oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, with Lawrence Hurley of Reuters joining the show to discuss both the first case and the second case, in which the Court will hear oral argument in early December.
- At NFIB, Luke Wake discusses the group’s First Amendment challenge to the FCC’s “solicited fax rule,” explaining that it hopes that “the Supreme Court will take the case to further refine its compelled speech doctrine—which prohibits government from forcing private actors to speak when they do not wish to engage in expressive conduct.”
- At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost reports on a recent lecture by law professor Paul Butler, who contends that the Court, “under two conservative chief justices — William H. Rehnquist and John G. Roberts Jr. — has issued decisions that give police ‘super powers’ to arrest, to racially profile, and even to kill.”
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) news 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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