Wednesday round-up

By Conor McEvily
on Aug 24, 2011 at 9:11 am

The federal government has received a thirty-day extension of time in which to respond to the cert. petition filed in the Sixth Circuit health-care challenge, Thomas More Law Center v. Obama.  Gerard Magliocca discusses the extension (and its possible implications) at Concurring Opinions.  And in an op-ed at the Forbes blog Capital Flows, Dan Danner of the National Federation of Independent Business urges the Court to weigh in on the constitutionality of the health-care law soon, arguing that businesses need “absolute resolution on one of the most pressing issues facing our economy.”

The New York Times reports on Grosz v. Museum of Modern Art, which the Justices will consider at their September 26 Conference.  The petition was filed by the heirs of artist George Grosz, who are seeking to reclaim three paintings that Grosz left behind when he fled Germany in 1933.  However, as the Times notes, the Court in recent years has denied cert. in other Nazi-era art cases, including June’s denial in Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena.

The Supreme Court sustained minor damage in yesterday’s earthquake.  The Associated Press (via the New York Times) and Bloomberg both have coverage.

Yesterday SCOTUSblog’s symposium on same-sex marriage featured a contribution from Professor Steve Sanders of the University of Michigan Law School, who argues the Court should hold California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional “to protect the integrity of thousands of existing marriages . . . against the coercive power of states that believe heteronormativity is so important a policy that it justifies not only banning new same-sex marriages, but breaking up existing ones.”  At the Forbes blog She Negotiates, Victoria Pynchon picks up on the post by Sanders, suggesting that his “characterization of the Constitutional issue as one that contravenes the existing property rights of legally married gay couples may be just the re-framing that puts this issue to bed as surely as Loving v. Virginia forever settled the rights of interracial couples to marry.”  And Chris Geidner of MetroWeekly discusses the effect that the Obama Administration’s decision not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act has had on the legal landscape more broadly, reporting that the decision has affected everything “from bankruptcy filings to civil-rights violation investigations and from ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ to immigration cases.”

Briefly:

• The University of Florida News reports that retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor will appear on September 12 on a panel to discuss judicial reform at that university’s law school.
• Following up on a recent story in the New Yorker on Justice Thomas and his wife (reported in Monday’s round-up), the New Yorker’s Back Issues blog looks back at reactions to Justice Thomas’s confirmation hearings nearly two decades ago.
• All Headline News discusses Perry v. New Hampshire, set for argument in November, in which the Court will consider when due process protections apply to suggestive eyewitness identifications.
• The ABA Journal notes that former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal will join the appellate group at Hogan Lovells – a story included in yesterday’s round-up.