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Monday round-up

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick contends that “[i]t’s an interesting exercise to read” the briefs filed by supporters of state bans on same-sex marriage “side by side with defenses of Indiana’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It’s virtually impossible to reconcile the two types of arguments, even though the same groups that pushed for the same-sex-marriage bans are also pushing for the new state RFRAs.” And in The National Law Journal (subscription required), Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle report on the two advocates who will make their debuts arguing at the Supreme Court in the same-sex marriage cases.

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Randy Barnett discusses a new cert. petition at the Court, “an interesting case out of the Fourth Circuit involving the suppression of free speech protesting a taking of private property.” Radley Balko also discusses the petition at The Washington Post’s The Watch.

Briefly:

  • In The National Law Journal, Tony Mauro interviews Sigram Schindler, the German business executive “who insisted last year that partner Howard Shipley file a petition with the Supreme Court almost exactly as he, Schindler, had written it — full of acronyms, tortured sentences and dense patent lingo. The unorthodox style of the brief could have gotten Shipley bounced from the Supreme Court bar.”
  • At The Hill, Jason Schwartz discusses the recent oral arguments in the challenge to the EPA’s regulations of utility emissions, arguing that “[t]he fate of 11,000 American lives each year may hinge on whether the Supreme Court Justices understand that fractions can’t be calculated without knowing the denominator.”
  • At the Election Law Blog, Michael Boos of the group Citizens United criticizes 99Rise, which recently disrupted proceedings at the Court, arguing that the latter group is the “very embodiment of the corporate form that it so readily condemns.”
  • At Constitution Daily, Scott Bomboy reports that “[a] controversy has apparently been settled between a designer who wanted the four female Supreme Court justices as Lego figurines and the toymaker who declined her initial request.”

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Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Monday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Apr. 6, 2015, 7:36 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2015/04/monday-round-up-253/