Round-Up

Addition: Jan Crawford Greenburg also posted this entry on her Legalities blog saying that the Court should not be described as the “Kennedy Court” but rather that “it’s the Roberts Court vs. the Stevens Court.”

Joan Biskupic of the USA Today reports here on Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, the First Amendment parody case that brought Reverend Jerry Fallwell to the Supreme Court in 1988.

In the Legal Times, Tony Mauro has this article about Justice Alito’s incoming clerk, Jessica Phillips, who carries on the long tradition of father-daughter Supreme Court clerks; Mauro follows up here with a few additional pairings at the BLT. Peter Lattman has this post about Mauro’s story at the WSJ.com Law Blog.

At Sentencing Law and Policy, Doug Berman has this post discussing the recent Sixth Circuit Valentine opinion, a vehicle for the High Court to address Booker retroactivity issues; and this post discussing whether the Court should remand Claiborne given the United States Sentencing Committee’s new Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy report.

Yesterday, David G. Savage had this article in the LA Times on the High Court’s decision to send a case involving a $55 million jury award against Ford Motor Co. back to a California appeals court for further consideration in light of the recent Philip Morris vs. Williams decision. Savage also reports here on the Landrigan opinion, another reversal of the Ninth Circuit; Linda Greenhouse had this article on the death penalty case in the New York Times yesterday.

Earlier this week, Rutgers Law Professor Sherry Colb had this column at FindLaw on the Court’s ruling in the high speed chase case, Scott v. Harris, which “signals a dispiriting consensus on the legitimacy of state violence.”