Thursday round-up

By Amy Howe
on May 8, 2014 at 9:05 am

In an op-ed for The Daily Beast, Geoffrey Stone criticizes Monday’s ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which a closely divided Court upheld a New York town’s practice of starting its town council meetings with a prayer.  Stone argues that “the court’s five conservative justices, unlike the four dissenters, showed no ‘empathy,’ no ‘understanding,’ of the ways in which the Christian-dominated prayers of the town of Greece might affect those who do not share that particular religious faith.”  In her column for The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus similarly decries the ruling, contending that, although the United States is “a predominantly Christian nation,” “we live here, too — we are Americans, too — and the Constitution, which prohibits elevating one religion over another, demands some sensitivity to this fact.”  And at ACSblog, William P. Marshall asserts that “one other prediction about the Galloway decision is likely to be a safe bet. The case will likely trigger more litigation than it resolves.”  But at Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Marci Hamilton provides a road map for the Court’s decision to explain why, in her view, although “it is tempting to assume this area of the law is a mess. In fact, the doctrine is more solid than it first appears, even if [its] application is fact-intensive.”

Briefly:

• At The Volokh Conspiracy, Will Baude looks at Monday’s summary decision in Tolan v. Cotton, in which the Court held that the lower court had erroneously granted summary judgment to a police officer in a lawsuit by a Texas man whom he had shot.  Baude explains that he regards the case as “noteworthy because by my count it’s the first time in 10 years that the court has ruled against a police officer in a qualified immunity case.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Thomas Edsall examines the debate “between those who contend that the Supreme Court decides cases on the basis of abstract principles of law and those who argue that judicial rulings are based primarily on political and economic considerations.”