Thursday round-up

By Kiran Bhat
on Sep 15, 2011 at 8:42 am

Justice Ginsburg was on a San Francisco-bound United Airlines flight that was forced to evacuate before take-off from Dulles Airport yesterday after the pilot noticed an engine problem. Ginsburg slid down the emergency chute to the tarmac and was not injured. Politico, the WSJ Law Blog, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press all have coverage.

Justice Breyer also played a significant role in Court coverage yesterday. The Associated Press (via NPR) reports that Breyer will serve on the jury for this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious awards for building design. And the Orange County Register reports that Breyer spoke yesterday to a crowd of over five hundred people at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, California.

Lawrence Hurley of Greenwire (via the New York Times) reports on a recent interview with former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who is now in private practice.  In the interview, Katyal – who while in the government successfully argued in American Electric Power Co., Inc. v. Connecticut that the Clean Air Act and the EPA’s implementation of that Act displaced any federal common law right to seek abatement of carbon dioxide emissions – criticized the strategy of pursuing common law nuisance actions against polluters.

Briefly:

• Writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Post contends that Justice Thomas’s dissent in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, in which the Court held that a California law prohibiting the sale or rental of violent video games to children was unconstitutional, “exposes the underlying flaws of the strict ‘originalist’ position in constitutional law better than any other text.”
• PR Newswire (via the Sacramento Bee) notes that the American Center for Law and Justice filed an amicus brief in Federal Communications Commission v. Fox “defending the ability of government authorities to outlaw public indecency.”