Wednesday round-up

There is extensive coverage of the two per curiam opinions released by the Court yesterday.  The ABA Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, USAToday, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution all report on Presley v. Georgia, in which the Court held that jury selection must be open to the public under the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a public trial. Bloomberg reports on Wellons v. Hall, in which the Court remanded a death row inmate’s bid for a new trial – based on the revelation that jurors at his trial had presented sexually suggestive gifts to the judge and bailiff – to the Eleventh Circuit for reconsideration in light of the Court’s decision last Term in another death penalty case.  The New York Times and Washington Post report on both of the opinions.

A host of newspapers reported yesterday that the Army Corps of Engineers has found DNA in water near Lake Michigan from the Asian carp species at issue in Michigan’s recent lawsuit against Illinois: among others, Bloomberg, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times.  The reports came on the same day that the Court denied the injunction, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Bloomberg, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the L.A. Times report on the Court’s dismissal of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appeals of a court order requiring him to reduce the California prisoner population by 40,000 within two years to relieve overcrowding.  At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger disputes the Court’s conclusion that it lacks jurisdiction to hear the appeals, contending instead that the case meets two sufficient criteria for Supreme Court review delineated in federal law.

Other summary orders released by the Court on Monday are briefly noted in the news. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the Court’s denial of a mother’s plea to read five verses of the Bible in her son’s class biographical presentation – the petition Busch v. Marple Newtown School District .  Bloomberg (via Business Week) notes that the Court also denied a petition – Hecker v. Deere & Co. – from workers seeking to sue their employer over high fees charged by the mutual funds offered through the company’s 401(k) plan. Finally, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Huffington Post, NPR, and Christian Science Monitor all have stories on the Court’s order requiring a lower court to reconsider its decision overturning the death sentence of Black Panther member Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Late last night, Lyle Denniston of this blog posited that the victory of Republican Scott Brown in yesterday’s special Senate election could limit President Obama’s options for judicial nominees: “a nominee with an identifiable liberal record may well be doomed (assuming that the White House has any lingering interest in that type of choice),” he writes.

SCOTUSblog’s publisher Tom Goldstein predicted yesterday that the Citizens United political speech case will be decided either this morning or on Monday, January 25.  In the opening post of an ACSblog debate on “the constitutional rights of corporations,” David Gans of the Constitution Accountability Center warns against a ruling in favor of Citizens United.  He argues that, since the founding of the United States, the rights granted individuals and corporations have been fundamentally different.

Revisiting last week’s five-to-four ruling banning television cameras in the ongoing Prop. 8 trial, the WSJ Law Blog speculates that the ruling might be a “harbinger” of how the Justices would divide on the merits of the case if it ultimately reached the Court.

And following up on last week’s oral argument in American Needle v. NFL, the New York Times has a feature on small retailers cut off from selling NFL apparel due to the League’s exclusive licensing agreement with Reebok.

Finally, at Balkinization, Elizabeth Wydra – the chief counsel of the Constitutional Accountability Center – laments that the City of Chicago has gone too far in its brief in the gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago toward protecting its gun ban by arguing that none of the substantive rights in the Bill of Rights are “incorporated” against the states by the Privileges or Immunities Clause.