Friday round-up
on Sep 21, 2012 at 9:12 am
Briefly:
- JURIST and the Constitutional Law Prof Blog have additional coverage of the Court’s denial on Wednesday of an application to preclude Texas from using interim electoral maps in the upcoming November elections. (Cormac also covered this story in yesterday’s round-up.)
- At Slate, Emily Bazelon examines the range of same-sex marriage cases that might be before the Court this Term, arguing that the Court should proceed incrementally and hear one of the “more cautious DOMA challenges,” rather than hear California’s Proposition 8 case.
- The Associated Press (via The Washington Post) and C-SPAN have coverage of Justice Kagan’s visit on Thursday to the University of Richmond Law School, in which she participated in a conversation with the dean, Wendy Perdue.
- Writing for the Associated Press, Mark Sherman considers the potential impact of the upcoming presidential election on the composition of the Court, including the possible effects of replacing even a single Justice.
- At the Crime and Consequences blog, Kent Scheidegger reports on the Eleventh Circuit’s decision on remand from the Court’s 2010 per curiam opinion in Wellons v. Hall, which remanded the case and instructed the lower court to consider whether the trial judge and jury had engaged in significant misconduct that undermined the petitioner’s death sentence. After considering the issue, the Eleventh Circuit again upheld the death sentence.
- On Thursday, the Court declined to stay the execution of Robert Wayne Harris, a Texas death row inmate. Harris was executed Thursday evening. Coverage comes from Reuters, AP, and CBS News.
- At the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Text & History Blog, Simon Lazarus argues that over the last few decades the Court has become “aggressively activist in narrowing, undermining, or effectively nullifying an array of statutes.”
- The new issue of The Nation is dedicated to what its editors characterize as “The One Percent Court,” featuring articles on a range of topics, including the role of the Court in campaign finance, antitrust law, labor rights, and the broader role that business interests have played recently in the Court’s opinions.
- This blog’s symposium on same-sex marriage continues with a contribution by William Eskridge.
