Wednesday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jan 7, 2015 at 7:57 am

In The New Yorker, Lincoln Caplan criticizes what he describes as the “advocacy gap” at the Supreme Court – a scenario in which clients with sufficient funds hire Supreme Court specialists to represent them, leaving those without the means to hire expensive lawyers to forgo such specialists.  Tom Goldstein responds to Caplan’s article in a post at this blog, arguing that “[i]t is not correct that the development of a specialist bar produces seriously lopsided representation at the Court.”

Briefly:

• In The Courier-Journal, Brianne Gorod contends that “2015 will be a big year for” Chief Justice John Roberts, not only because in September he will celebrate “his 10th anniversary as chief justice,” but also because, “[b]ut before he gets there, he could be deciding two of the biggest cases of his tenure so far.”
• In commentary at Communities Digital News, Allan Brownfeld discusses the case of whistleblower Robert MacLean, in which the Court heard oral argument last fall; he concludes that “[l]iberals, who proclaim their support for individual rights, and conservatives, who express concern about the dangers of big and out-of-control government, should have no difficulty agreeing that protecting the rights of whistleblowers is essential.”
• In The National Law Journal, Ruthann Robson argues that, although “[n]ationwide protests over the killing of black men by police officers rightly focus on racial disparities in all phases of criminal justice,” “the role of race in noncriminal contexts as shaped by the U.S. Supreme Court is just as important.”