Blog Round-Up – Thursday, December 28th
On Balkinization law professor Sandy Levinson has this post on Alito and executive power.
PrawfsBlawg has this post on the relationship between Padilla’s case and the companion case to Korematsu, Ex parte Endo. In Ex parte Endo the Supreme Court granted a habeas petition filed by a Japanese-American internee on the ground that the government (through the War Relocation Authority) lacked the authority to hold her.
Sentencing Law & Policy has this post on whether or not Alito’s death penalty jurisprudence could mean trouble for his nomination.
The Volokh Conspiracy has this post on Kelo. It references an article from the the New London Day newspaper that has uncovered the depth of the Pfizer’s involvement in motivating the government’s exercise of the eminent domain power to take the Kelo plaintiffs’ homes. The Volokh Conspiracy also has this post with an op-ed by Randy Barnett on whether or not the “new federalism” will survive Justice Rehnquist’s death.
The Washington Post’s blog, Campaign for the Supreme Court, has compiled this sampling of headlines various news outlets chose to place on the story about a 1984 memo in which Alito urges the Solicitor General to support qualified immunity for the attorney general in a wiretap case.
Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at George Washington University and legal affairs editor at the New Republic; and Stuart Taylor, a columnist with National Journal and a fellow at the Brookings Institution discuss the Alito nomination at the Online NewsHour here.
The Sentencing Law and Policy post referred to is actually a tongue-in-cheek query of whether Judge Alito is in trouble because of a campaign against him by convicted murderer Antuan Bronshtein. The irony is that Alito ruled in favor of Bronshtein on his penalty-phase claim and vacated his death sentence. In order to do so despite the fact that Bronshtein voluntarily dismissed the state-court petition filed on his behalf, Judge Alito had to declare Pennsylvania’s one-year statute of limitation an “inadequate” procedural default rule. IMHO, he erred in the defendant’s favor on this issue, disproving the allegation that he always favors the prosecution on debatable issues.
Comment by Kent Scheidegger — December 30, 2005 @ 1:12 pm