Tuesday round-up

By Nabiha Syed
on Sep 28, 2010 at 10:38 am

This morning the Court is expected to issue grants resulting from yesterday’s “Long Conference.” Please check the main page for live-blogging of the orders as they are released. For more background, Anna has posted on petitions to watch, available here.

Pete Yost of the Associated Press reports on one case that the Justices considered at their conference yesterday, involving the liability of defense contractors that cooperate with soldiers in war zones. (A video clip of the news is available from the Associated Press here). At the WSJ Law Blog, Nathan Koppel reviews recent developments in Wal-Mart’s efforts to gain Supreme Court review of the Ninth Circuit’s decision allowing a class action alleging gender discrimination to proceed against it.  Elsewhere, as the Court approaches its new Term, reporters and commentators discuss the impact of past cases.   At the WSJ Law Blog, Nathan Koppel and Ashby Jones examine the effect of the Court’s decision last June in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, in which the Court held that foreign shareholders who had purchased shares in a foreign bank overseas could not bring securities-fraud claims in U.S. courts.  And in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn criticizes the Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which permitted governments to seize private property for economic development, as encouraging “an explosion of litigation, neighbor set against neighbor” and putting “taxpayers on the hook for millions in legal fees and project costs.” The Sentencing Law and Policy Blog and PointofLaw report that the Senate Committee on the Judiciary will hold a hearing this morning on how to “[r]estor[e] [k]ey [t]ools to [c]ombat [f]raud and [c]orruption” in light of  last Term’s decision in Skilling v. United States. Mike Dorf recaps an ABA webinar on last Term’s animal cruelty “crush video” case, United States v. Stevens, in light of a bill currently pending in Congress. And at the Associated Press, Jim Kuhnhenn looks at the effect of the Citizens United decision on the Citizens United organization.

Briefly:

• Dahlia Lithwick and Carl Tobias of Slate ponder why Americans seem to care so little about judicial politics, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. weighs in on what he describes as a “confirmation crisis” in an opinion piece for the Washington Post.
• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr argues that Lincoln Caplan’s discussion of Justice Breyer’s new book for the New York Times (to which James linked in yesterday’s round-up) wrongly assumes that “a Justice’s deference to federal laws reflects that Justice’s deference to legislative acts more broadly.”
• Jost on Justice reviews the impact of the Roberts Court on business.
• Andrew Cohen of Politics Daily offers a general overview of the Court’s cases this Term.