Friday round-up
on Mar 8, 2019 at 6:53 am
Amy Howe reports for this blog, in a post that first appeared at Howe on the Court, that yesterday Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan testified about the Supreme Court’s budget at a congressional hearing, “field[ing] questions about cameras in the courtroom, law clerk diversity, partisan attacks on the judiciary, and the #MeToo movement.” Jess Bravin reports for The Wall Street Journal that, according to Kagan, “Chief Justice John Roberts is weighing whether to create a code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court.” At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that, asked about diversity in law-clerk hiring, Kagan said she thinks the justices are “’doing better’” now, noting that for the first time ever, more than half of this term’s law clerks are female.” Robert Barnes reports for The Washington Post that Alito and Kagan told the lawmakers that “[d]espite public support for televising Supreme Court hearings, the ban will remain for the foreseeable future and the issue isn’t much of a topic of conversation among the justices.”
Briefly:
- In the latest episode of the Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 podcast, “Ilya Shapiro from the Cato Institute joins Elizabeth Slattery to discuss whether Chief Justice John Roberts is the new swing vote and other SCOTUS headlines of the week.”
- At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Suja Thomas writes that in Timbs v. Indiana, in which the court held that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines applies to states and localities under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, “[w]hat the Court failed to do was to mention the few rights that remain unincorporated—and to attempt to justify why.”
- At The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin explains that “the President’s [Supreme Court] appointees and their allies are making quiet progress on [a] key goal of his political base: transforming the place of religion in American life”: “The short version of what’s going on is that the establishment clause is out, and the free-exercise clause is in.”
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