Friday round-up

By Kiera Flynn
on Aug 26, 2011 at 10:04 am

Yesterday, Chief Justice Roberts issued an in-chambers opinion rejecting an application by a Virginia death-row inmate, who had asked the Court to stay a district court order setting the briefing schedule for his federal habeas proceedings until the Court acts on his petition for certiorari seeking review of a judgment of the Virginia Supreme Court.  The case is Gray v. Kelly (No. 11A210).

SCOTUSblog’s symposium on same-sex marriage added three posts yesterday from Robert A. Levy of the Cato Institute, Brian Raum of the Alliance Defense Fund, and Charles Fried of Harvard Law School.  The entire symposium can be found here.

Briefly:

• In a post at Cato@Liberty, Ilya Shapiro outlines the possible next steps for health-care litigation at the Court.  He predicts that a challenge to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act will indeed reach the Court this Term “one way or another, with argument in the spring and a decision the last week of June.”
• In a post at Concurring Opinions, Gerard Magliocca discusses a recent NPR story about recusal practices.  Positing that a proposal by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to allow a retired Supreme Court Justice to replace a recused, active Justice in a case would be “problematic,” “because the pool of senior Justices capable of hearing cases is usually so small and the ideological views within that pool will be well-known to litigants who want to game the system,” he suggests instead that “when a Justice is recused then any federal circuit judge can be tapped to ‘sit by designation’ on the Supreme Court.”
• The Boston Globe reports on the effect that the Court’s 2009 decision in Carcieri v. Salazar has had on efforts to legalize casinos in Massachusetts.