Thursday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jul 9, 2015 at 10:31 am

Coverage of and commentary on the Court continue to focus on the just-ended Term as a whole.  In the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports on a study suggesting that the Term as a whole was a “mixed” one for business, while in her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse contends that, “[a]s a mirage in the morning light, the ‘liberal Roberts court’ narrative is now fading.”  Steven Mazie makes a similar observation at The Economist’s Democracy in America blog; he argues that, if “come next spring, affirmative-action admissions policies are found to contravene the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee, or mandatory union dues are struck down as a violation of free speech, it will be the liberals’ turn to decry the court’s judicial activism while conservatives nod solemnly and announce that the Constitution has been vindicated.”  And the Room for Debate feature of The New York Times looks more broadly at whether the Court has become too powerful.     

Briefly:

• In The New Yorker, Amy Davidson discusses (and criticizes) efforts to compare the Court’s recent decision on same-sex marriage to the Court’s infamous 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case.
• At casetext, James Blumstein analyzes the Court’s decision in King v. Burwell and concludes that it was “highly disappointing and institutionally corrosive; the Court missed an opportunity to empower Congress (and indirectly the states) by ruling for [the] plaintiffs.”
• In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that “[t]wo private religious universities and a seminary launched the next wave of Affordable Care Act cases in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, in a challenge stemming from the law’s contraceptive insurance requirement.”

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