Wednesday round-up
on May 14, 2014 at 6:16 am
Briefly:
- At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie looks at partisanship on the Court and suggests that the Court’s current Term “provides more evidence of the current liberals’ relative neutrality vis-a-vis their conservative brethren.”
- With the sixtieth anniversary of the Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education just a few days away, Erwin Chemerinsky looks back at the decision at ACSblog. He contends both that, despite the ruling, “American public schools remain separate and unequal” and that the “Supreme Court deserves a great deal of the blame” for that problem.
- At Pollvogtarian, Susannah Pollvogt compares the Court’s 1996 opinion in Romer v. Evans and its 2014 opinion in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, both of which were authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy. She suggests that “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the only difference between” them “is the identity of the minority group being harmed.”
- John Fritze of The Baltimore Sun reports that a University of Maryland law professor whose book was cited in the Court’s recent decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway, upholding a New York town’s prayer practice, contends that “the decision misread the point of his book and took the quote out of context in a way that allowed the justices to draw an entirely different conclusion about how the Founding Fathers approached religion in public.”
[Disclosure: Kevin Russell of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Schuette. However, I am not affiliated with the firm.]
