Blog Round-Up – Monday, December 5th

Here, on a C-SPAN companion site, is an interview with Justice Breyer about the court and his new book.

The Federal Public Defender has filed a cert petition in a case challenging the constitution of the DNA Backlog Elimination Act. The Third Circuit Blog has a post on it here.

Here the Election Law Blog comments on this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Abigail Thernstrom on Alito and one-person one-vote jurisprudence.

Here ACSBlog has summaries of the various briefs filed in FAIR v. Rumsfeld.

This week the Legal Affairs Debate Club asks, “What Good Are Special Counsels?” Debating the issue are David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, partners in the Washington D.C. office of Baker & Hostetler and Katy Harriger, Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University.

Crime & Federalism has this post on the Court’s decision to hear Clark v. Arizona, the insanity defense case.

On the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr has this post pondering the following question: When applying traditional legal doctrines to computers, when should courts model computers as people? In it he discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). In Smith, the government asked a phone company to install a “pen register” machine on the suspect’s phone to find out what numbers he was dialing. When the defendant placed a call to harass his victim, the pen register installed at the phone company recorded the outgoing numbers dialed on the call, confirming the call to the victim. The defendant argued that the surveillance violated his Fourth Amendment rights, but the Supreme Court rejected the claim.