Friday round-up
on Apr 1, 2016 at 7:55 am
Coverage of the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, and the vacancy on the Court more generally, comes from Richard Wolf of USA Today, who notes that, “[i]f the past few weeks are any indication,” “change has come to the high court, and the justices are dealing with it in fits and starts.” In another article, Wolf reports that, “[l]ong before they made headlines, President Obama’s embattled Supreme Court nominee and Donald Trump’s beleaguered campaign manager had a legal altercation over a gun.”
Commentary comes from Dahlia Lithwick, who at Slate suggests “the single most fantastic thing that could ever happen to resolve the blockade of hysteria that now threatens both the court and the country”; from the editorial board of The Washington Post, which urges Senate Republicans to “consider Merrick Garland’s nomination immediately,” on the ground that “a quarter of a presidential term is a long time to go without a full Supreme Court.”
On Wednesday, the Court issued its decision in Luis v. United States, holding that the pretrial restraint of a criminal defendant’s untainted asset violates the Sixth Amendment. I covered the opinion for this blog, with commentary coming from Ian Millhiser, who at ThinkProgress describes Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion in the case as “the most interesting opinion the Court has handed down this year”; Charles Pierce, who at Esquire looks at the ramifications of the decision for the public-defender system; and Matt Ford, who at The Atlantic similarly suggests that “the justices came close to asking a more troubling question: Does America’s underfunded public-defender system meet the Sixth Amendment’s standards for adequate legal counsel?”
Briefly:
- In a podcast for Constitution Daily, Greg Lipper and Michael Moreland discuss Zubik v. Burwell, the challenge to the accommodation offered to religious non-profits that object to the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate.
- In his column for The Economist, Steven Mazie considers the four-four affirmance in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, observing that, “[i]f the Senate eventually sees fit to hold confirmation hearings on Mr Scalia’s successor—something that seems unlikely to happen before the next president is elected—the fate of organised labour will fall to the 113th justice.”
- At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman “looks at trends in this Term and the five preceding it, examining both idiosyncrasies and similarities.”
- At The Marshall Project, Evan Mandery looks at the Court’s 1972 “grand compromise” on the death penalty.
- At Hamilton and Griffin on Rights, Angela Morrison looks back at the oral argument in CRST Van Expedited v. EEOC, contending that it “highlights the damage the Court and the lower courts’ avoidance of the merits in employment discrimination suits have done to Title VII’s enforcement goals.”
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.
[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Zubik. However, I am not affiliated with the firm.]
