Wednesday round-up

AMY HOWE JUL 6, 2016 5:03 AM

In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reviews Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissents this Term, describing them as “a remarkable body of work from an increasingly skeptical student of the criminal justice system.”  At Reason, Damon Root contends that Sotomayor “is fast becoming the Supreme Court’s biggest defender of the Fourth Amendment,” while at Legal Aggregate Ronald Tyler reports that his “own reaction” to the Court’s ruling in the Fourth Amendment case Utah v. Strieff “is dismay over the majority decision and strong agreement with Justice Sotomayor’s powerful dissent.” 

Commentary on the Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, holding that the race-conscious admissions policy in use when Abigail Fisher applied (unsuccessfully) to the university does not violate the Constitution, comes from Lawrence Friedman, who at New England Law Review’s On Remand argues that the ruling “confirms Justice O’Connor’s observation in Grutter v. Bolinger: ‘Although all governmental uses of race are subject to strict scrutiny, not all are invalidated by it.’”  And at Vox, Richard Thompson Ford contends that the ruling “marks a turning point in the long controversy surrounding race-conscious admissions policies and perhaps an important shift in the orientation of the Supreme Court as well.”

At Casetext, Stephen Gilles weighs in on the Court’s decision striking down two provisions in a Texas law that regulates abortion; he argues that “there is still a gulf between Justice Kennedy and the four un-ambivalent defenders of abortion rights he joined in striking down H.B. 2.”    And in The American Prospect, Deana Rohlinger contends that, for the first time since 1973, “pro-life advocates find themselves squarely on the losing side of a watershed legal decision.”

Briefly:

• MoloLamken compiled its annual “business briefing,” concluding that the Court during the October Term 2015 “showed a marked emphasis on consensus-building, often resting on narrower grounds more likely to command a significant majority of the Court’s members.”
• At Blavity, Zachary Fisch marks Thurgood Marshall’s 108^th birthday with “5 things you might not know about” Marshall.
• At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Angela Morrison looks at the four-four tie in United States v. Texas, the challenge to the Obama administration’s deferred-action policy for certain undocumented immigrants; she contends that “what is clear is that Texas, through its arguments in this suit and other immigration suits in the past year, has shown it is willing to spend its residents’ tax dollars to pursue an anti-immigrant litigation strategy.”
• In the Miami Herald, Carli Teproff reports on the latest developments in the case of Fane Lozman, who “fought for years for the right to live on his houseboat. His case went from zoning officers to City Hall, and all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

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