Thursday round-up
on Dec 3, 2015 at 8:26 am
As Lyle Denniston reported for this blog, by a vote of five to four, the Court yesterday “extended an order that will keep the results of a Hawaii election from being known or approved while a court test of the balloting rules goes on.” Jess Bravin also covered the order for The Wall Street Journal, with commentary from Rick Hasen at his Election Law Blog.
Next week the Court will hear oral arguments in Evenwel v. Abbott, the “one person, one vote” challenge to the state legislative maps in Texas. At The Heritage Foundation, Andrew Grossman contends that, if the Court is true to its precedents, it will act to enforce Sue Evenwel’s and Edward Pfenninger’s right to cast votes of the same weight as those of their fellow Texans. If it does not do that, its decision will mark a real break in the law of OPOV and, as a practical matter, could even spell the beginning of the end of the doctrine.” At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen posts a recent telebriefing on the case, hosted by the Constitutional Accountability Center, in which he participated.
Briefly:
- Mark Walsh of Education Week reports that Justice Sonia Sotomayor has joined the board of iCivics, a civics education group founded by retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
- At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Angela Morrison looks at Monday’s oral arguments in Green v. Brennan and she suggests that, although some “commentators expressed surprise that the Roberts court, and especially Chief Justice Roberts, whom many view as pro-business and pro-employer, seemed to empathize with the employee’s plight,” “it is likely not the employee who made a difference in this case but the employer.”
- In The Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin reports on yesterday’s oral arguments in Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, involving ERISA and state “all payer” health care databases.
- The Citizen’s Guide to the Supreme Court looks ahead to next week’s oral arguments in the challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process.
- In an op-ed in The New York Times, Richard Posner and Eric Segall discuss recent remarks by Justice Antonin Scalia and conclude that the “logic of his position is that the Supreme Court should get out of the business of enforcing the Constitution altogether, for enforcing it overrides legislation, which is the product of elected officials, and hence of democracy.”
