Thursday round-up

By Kiran Bhat
on Aug 18, 2011 at 8:39 am

Discussion of the Court and the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act (the subject of a recently closed symposium on this blog) continues today.  Writing at Politico, Ilya Shapiro discusses the Eleventh Circuit’s decision and urges the federal government to seek Supreme Court review of the ruling expeditiously; he argues that “[a]fter so many briefs and arguments, and so many detailed opinions by so many thoughtful judges . . . there is nothing gained by further delay.” The editorial board of Bloomberg View weighs in on the Court and health care as well, contending that if the Court’s conservative Justices invalidate the Affordable Care Act, they will usher in “a new era of conservative judicial activism, imposing their agenda through the courts, just as they have long accused liberals of doing.” Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal discusses the speculation (which Joshua noted in Tuesday’s round-up) that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy will be the critical votes in any Court review of the Affordable Care Act. Finally, in the second story of a two-part feature on ethics and the Court, NPR’s Nina Totenberg discusses Justice recusals specifically as they pertain to health care.

Unless the Court stays the execution, Virginia will execute death row inmate Jerry Terrell Jackson tonight. In 2003, a jury convicted Jackson of the 2001 rape and murder of an eighty-eight-year-old woman. Reuters has coverage of Jackson’s final appeal.

Briefly:

• Over a year after the Court’s decision in Lewis v. City of Chicago, holding that employers can be sued for using results from tests that rule out disproportionate numbers of women and minorities, the Chicago Tribune reports that Chicago will pay $45 million to compensate thousands of African Americans who missed a chance to become Chicago firefighters because of the discriminatory test at issue in Lewis.
• Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal also reports that the ABA has filed an amicus brief in Martinez v. Ryan; the brief argues that a “defendant’s fair trial right isn’t protected if he receives ineffective assistance of counsel at the trial stage and again at his first appellate opportunity to raise the claim.”
• Writing at PrawfsBlawg, Allan Erbsen discusses J. McIntyre Machinery v. Nicastro and its “fascinating, potentially significant, and largely overlooked discussion about how horizontal federalism frames constitutional limits on adjudicative jurisdiction in state courts.”