Round-Up

Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal reports here (subscription req’d) on yesterday’s dismissal of two Guantanamo cases by military judges, calling it “an unexpected stumble”; in today’s New York Times, Adam Liptak has this article on the two separate rulings, a “decisive rebuke” for the Bush administration; Renee Montagne and Jackie Northam report here on NPR’s “Morning Edition”; and Jim Michaels has this story in the USA Today on the decisions, “which dealt a setback to Bush Administration efforts to try terrorism suspects in military courts.”

NPR’s Nina Totenberg had this report on “All Things Considered” about the Court’s unanimous opinion in Sole v. Wyner, “ruling that that a naked peace demonstrator must pay her own attorney fees”; David G. Savage reports here in the LA Times that “the Supreme Court’s first ruling on an Iraq war protest is not likely to be remembered as a landmark.”

The Washington Post’s Charles Lane reports here on the Court’s ruling in Uttecht, which “bolstered trial judges’ authority to shape juries in death penalty cases”; Linda Greenhouse has this article in The New York Times on yesterday’s developments at the Supreme Court and highlighting Justice Stevens’s dissent in the Uttecht decision, which may be “an expression of the liberal justices’ frustration with how the term is going.” In the USA Today, Joan Biskupic reports here on the ruling and Stevens’s dissenting opinion, “part of a recent pattern, where the four liberal justices have found themselves on the losing side of cases and are objecting in unusually forceful terms.”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Bravin reports here (subscription req’d) on the Court’s unanimous decision in the consolidated cases Safeco v. Burr and Geico v. Edo, “a ruling that frees insurers from the risk of class-action lawsuits alleging they failed to send required notices to millions of consumers”; at the WashingtonPost.com Security Fix Blog, Brian Krebs has this post on yesterday’s ruling in the credit-reports case, which “effectively confined the Ninth Circuit’s open-ended definition of what kinds of actions constitute reckless disregard.” Deepak Gupta weighs in here at the Consumer Law and Policy Blog, on the “incomplete victory” for consumers; and in today’s LA Times, Savage has this article on the ruling, “which unanimously reversed the 9th Circuit, shielding the two insurers from being sued.”

At the Workplace Prof Blog, Paul Secunda weighs in here on the Court’s grant in Federal Express Corp. v. Holowecki, which “will answer the question of what constitutes a ‘charge’ for purposes of employment discrimination law” left open by Edelman v. Lynchburg College, 535 U.S. 928 (2002). The Associated Press has this report on the Court’s decision to grant the age discrimination case.

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, Robert Barnes had this article on intra-government wrangling over Joblove v. Barr Laboratories, a drug-patent case in which the Solicitor General asserts cert. should be denied despite the Federal Trade Commission’s belief it is “one of the most important cases for consumers presented to the Court this year.”

At Bench Memos, Ed Whelan has this post discussing Justice Ginsburg’s dissent last week in Ledbetter.

Mary Ann Zehr reports here (registration req’d) at Education Week on the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Plyler v. Doe, which “comes at a time of renewed—and fierce—national debate over immigration, including a weighing of the contributions and costs to local governments and economies of undocumented immigrants and their children.”

Lastly, in this debate at PENNumbra, Fairleigh Dickinson University Professor Bruce Peabody and Scott Gant of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, discuss the televising of Supreme Court proceedings.