Monday round-up
on May 7, 2012 at 9:55 am
Briefly:
- At the WSJ Law Blog, Jess Bravin reports that immigrant rights groups have asked the Court to correct a factual error in its 2009 decision in Nken v. Holder. The opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, cites erroneous information provided by the Solicitor General’s office.
- Adam Liptak of the New York Times reviews the criticism of the Solicitor General’s performance at the health care oral arguments and notes that “the small band of lawyers who argue frequently before the Supreme Court say his performance was solid, conveying the points he was paid to make in sober and deliberate fashion.”
- Michael Doyle of McClatchy Newspapers covers two recent cert. petitions, Agarano v. Mattos and Brooks v. Daman, which ask the Court to consider when the use of a Taser constitutes excessive force under the Fourth Amendment.
- Forbes’s Michael Bobelian reports on a recent poll by the Pew Center showing that only fifty-two percent of Americans hold a favorable view of the Court, the Court’s lowest favorability rating since 1987, when the Pew Center began collecting this statistic.
- In an op-ed for the National Law Journal, Erwin Chemerinsky argues that the Justices decided this Term’s Fourth Amendment cases – United States v. Jones and Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders – based on whether they could imagine the search at issue applying to them personally.
- David Segal of the New York Times reviews the impact of last Term’s AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion; according to one report, judges have cited the decision at least seventy-six times in preventing a potential class action lawsuit from moving ahead.
- David Glendinning of American Medical News reports on a recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicating that oral arguments in the challenge to the Affordable Care Act did not significantly alter the public’s perception of the law.
- In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Neal Gabler argues that the current Court is not simply political, but partisan, and that this judicial partisanship “is the most potent and pernicious form of judicial activism – one that seriously threatens the separation of powers.”
- UPI’s Michael Kirkland previews next Term’s Chaidez v. United States, in which the Court will consider whether its ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky applies retroactively to those whose convictions became final before its announcement.
- According to a press release from Harvard Law School, the school celebrated retired Justice John Paul Stevens’s time on the Court with an event last week that honored his contributions to the fields of environmental, energy, and natural resources law.
- The Dartmouth reports on a recent speech by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr. at that school.
