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Thursday round-up

The Court may be in recess, but the Justices are making appearances around the country.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor was at Yale University, where she attended law school; she told an audience that “each year I think my opinions have been getting better. And I’m working at finding my voice a little bit.”  Fox News Latino has the story.  And Justice Elena Kagan delivered the 2014 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lecture on Women and the Law at the New York City Bar Association (video), where (among other things) she attributed the “gulf between Justice Ginsburg’s career and” hers to the work of Justice Ginsburg herself. 

Briefly:

  • In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse examines McCullen v. Coakley, the challenge to the buffer zone around abortion clinics in Massachusetts, and the Court’s order in the Little Sisters of the Poor case, in which it gave the order of nuns a temporary reprieve from having either to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate or to submit a form certifying its objection to compliance.  Greenhouse expresses concern about what she describes as “the real story that I see emerging here: sustained aggressiveness by religious groups that sense weakness in the executive branch and welcoming arms at the Roberts court.”
  • Justice Anthony Kennedy has endorsed an appeal to members of the United Nations on the importance of access to justice as a development priority.  Open Society Foundations has the statement and the full list of signatories.

Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Thursday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Feb. 6, 2014, 8:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/02/thursday-round-up-213/