Friday round-up

In a podcast for the Constitution Center, Carrie Severino and Michael Dorf try to make sense of an unpredictable year at the Court, while Sullivan & Cromwell looks back at the business cases at the Court. In The Economist, Steven Mazie contends that the justice responsible for steering the court to the left was Anthony Kennedy, Scalias fellow Ronald Reagan nominee, while in The New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin suggests that there was so much drama at the Court this Term that it was possible to miss a curious subplot: the full flowering of Justice Clarence Thomass judicial eccentricity.

Commentary on Mondays ruling in Whole Womans Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the Court struck down two provisions of a Texas law regulating abortions, comes from Linda Hirshman, who in The Washington Post contends that the Court also issued a decision on a matter fundamental to the national political divide: In a nation of laws, the Supreme Court held, you cannot have your own facts. And in a video for Constitution Daily, Clark Forsythe, Kathryn Kolbert, and Mary Ziegler discuss the ruling and future constitutional debates about abortion.

In The Huffington Post, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy weighs in on the Mondays decision in McDonnell v. United States, striking down the former Virginia governors federal corruption convictions; she argues that the ruling broadcasts entirely the wrong message to both elected officials and the businessmen, businesswomen and their lobbyists trying to woo them into action. And at Mayer Browns Meaningful Discussions, Marcia Madsen (and her co-authors) caution that, after the decision, companies that regularly interact with government personnel will need to remain diligent in both understanding ethical restraints on business relationships with government officials and have a clear compliance and training program.

Briefly:

• At The New England Law Reviews On Remand, Lawrence Friedman weighs in on the Courts recent decision in Utah v. Strieff; he argues that, until some effort is made to rethink the rules foundations, the protection afforded privacy by the Fourth Amendment will continue to wither until it becomes little more than a parchment promise.
• At The George Washington Law Reviews On the Docket, Joan Meier looks at Mondays ruling in Voisine v. United States, in which the Court ruled that a domestic-violence conviction is a misdemeanor crime of violence for purposes of limiting access to firearms, and concludes that, although the decision was relatively straightforward, future firearms cases may be much less so.

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