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Friday round-up

Reviews of the just-ended Term continue.  The Costa Mesa Daily Pilot reports on one such “Term in Review” panel, at the University of California-Irvine School of Law (which Conor covered in Wednesday’s round-up), while Lyle Denniston of this blog participated in an event at the National Constitution Center last week (audio is available here).

Other journalists and commentators focus on specific recent decisions of the Court, as well as the effects of those decisions. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, E.J. Dionne criticizes the Court’s recent refusal to stay the execution of Mexican national Humberto Leal, arguing that “the indifference that five U.S. Supreme Court justices have shown” to the rule of law is “remarkable.”  At Justia.com’s Verdict, Sherry F. Colb analyzes the Court’s Confrontation Clause jurisprudence and argues that the Court’s “Crawford [v. Washington] experiment has failed”:  “so long as the Court adheres to Crawford,” she contends, “it promises more confusion and indeterminacy for the foreseeable future.”    At Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project, Timothy Lamoureux discusses what he describes as the “real issue” Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association:  “whether video games are art (and protected speech) or an activity (and subject to regulation).”   David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times reports on the effects that the Court’s decision in Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom PAC v. Bennett, in which the Court invalidated Arizona’s matching funds campaign finance scheme, may have on a similar program in Los Angeles. And finally, at the San Antonio Express News, Gene Policinski argues that this Term “the Court reminded us that our free-speech rights don’t rest on values or concerns of the moment, nor are they subject to…a balancing test of the value of a particular category of speech against its impact in society.”

Briefly:

  • Later this month, Justice Breyer will make his first public appearance in Vermont since being named to the Court in 1994, the Vermont Journalism Trust reports.
  • The First Amendment Center reports on the results of its national survey, including the fact that seventy-eight percent of poll respondents believe that Supreme Court proceedings should be televised.

Recommended Citation: Nabiha Syed, Friday round-up, SCOTUSblog (Jul. 15, 2011, 8:30 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2011/07/friday-round-up-84/