Tuesday round-up
At Vox, Dylan Matthews contends that the “unfilled vacancy of Antonin Scalia’s seat combined with a Hillary Clinton victory in November could set the Court on a new course.” At MinnPost, Paul Anderson – a retired state supreme court justice – argues that the “refusal of Senate Republicans to allow any hearing on the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court is a reckless and dangerous act.” In The Atlantic, Barry Friedman analyzes Scalia’s legacy on policy and concludes that “a new president could change the constitutional law of policing more dramatically than it has been in decades.” Finally, at CNN, Joan Biskupic looks back at Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s path to the Court thirty-five years ago and suggests that it “demonstrates how a long-odds nominee gets skillfully positioned to enjoy the luck of presidential selection.”
Briefly:
- At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman looks at the “summer pipeline” – petitions for review filed “between the end of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Term and August 22, 2016.”
- At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost weighs in on the challenge to North Carolina’s 2013 election laws and suggests that, because the state may be a “critical” one “in the presidential election, the Supreme Court owes the state, and the nation, a decision that is fair not to one side, but to both.”
- In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik reports that the “minefield” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted in the wake of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores “has now detonated”: last week a federal district judge in Michigan “ruled that a local funeral home was well within its rights to fire a transgender employee because its owner had a religious belief that gender transition violated biblical teachings.”
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that former Michigan solicitor general John Bursch, who defended state bans on same-sex marriage, “has gone solo, opening an appellate boutique in Caledonia, Michigan.”
- In The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that this Term the Court will consider whether a Texas court “went astray last year in upholding the death sentence of Bobby J. Moore based in part on outdated medical criteria and in part on” a standard outlined in the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men.
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