Friday round-up
On Thursday the Department of Justice announced that Solicitor General Don Verrilli will step down at the end of the month. Coverage comes from Lyle Denniston for this blog, Nina Totenberg of NPR, David Savage of Los Angeles Times, Richard Wolf of USA Today, and Tony Mauro at Law.com (subscription or registration may be required). In a second post, for The National Law Journal (subscription may be required), Mauro chronicles Verrilli’s major wins and losses.
This week Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor appeared at the National Museum of American History, where they discussed food and the Court. Andrew Hamm covered the event for this blog, with other coverage coming from Tony Mauro for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required).
Briefly:
- More Perfect, a Supreme-Court-focused spin-off of Radiolab, debuts its first podcast, on how the Court has grappled with the issue of capital punishment.
- At Legal Aggregate, Robert Weisberg looks back at the Court’s actions this week in two death penalty cases, as well as what the presidential election might mean for the future of the death penalty.
- In The Huffington Post, Geoffrey Stone discusses a new law review article in which “law professors Robin Kar and Jason Mazzone have taken a deep dive into the history of Supreme Court nominations to test the plausibility of the Senate Republicans’ purported ‘justification’ for their action.”
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Zoe Tillman reports that “[f]ederal prosecutors want wider latitude to bring criminal charges against individuals who disrupt arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court.”
- In an editorial for Detroit Free Press, Stephen Henderson looks back at last week’s decision in Foster v. Chatman, concluding that the Court “is in a decades-long battle with lower courts to take seriously the racial bias that infects jury selection.”
- NPR’s Camila Domonoske reports that two researchers have identified “a new species of leaf-dwelling praying mantis, dubbed Ilomantis ginsburgae” – an insect named after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
- Commentary on Monday’s decision in United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. Inc., in which the Court ruled that an approved “jurisdictional determination” by the Army Corps of Engineers is a final agency action subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act, comes from Ilya Shapiro, who at Cato at Liberty notes that the Obama administration’s “spate of unanimous losses is truly record-breaking.”
- Also at Cato at Liberty, Shapiro discusses an article in which he argues that the Court misread “constitutional structure and application” with its decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, in which the Court upheld Texas’s redistricting maps, drawn using total population.
- McClatchy DC’s Michael Doyle reports on the case of a California man on death row at Fort Leavenworth, “a capital punishment challenge that gives justices a rare opportunity to march into matters of military law.”
- At PublicSquare.net, Kevin Johnson and John Eastman debate United States v. Texas, the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred-action policy.
- At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman analyzes the briefs filed by the Office of the Solicitor General at the Court’s invitation and concludes that “the SG is cautious about recommending cases to the Court, and as an entity would prefer to deny cases that are on the margin to keep the number of recommended grants low.”
Remember, we rely exclusively on our readers to send us links for our round-up. 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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