Wednesday round-up

By Conor McEvily
on Aug 10, 2011 at 10:59 am

In a blog post for the Washington Post, Ezra Klein discusses Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, in which California Medicaid providers are challenging the state’s proposed ten-percent-cut to their payments. At his Jost on Justice blog, Ken Jost looks at a recent First Circuit decision rejecting a suit seeking voting rights for Puerto Ricans.  While acknowledging that  the suit faces an “uphill” battle in seeking Supreme Court review, Jost suggests that the case may benefit from the presence of Justice Sotomayor who is of Puerto Rican descent.

The editorial board of the New York Times urges the Securities and Exchange Commission to quickly craft rules requiring companies to disclose to shareholders how they use corporate resources for political activities.  Such a “uniform rule of disclosure,” the board argues, “would help shareholders assess the profitability of a company’s political activities and protect democracy from the flood of money unleashed by the Citizens United decision.”  Striking a similar chord, the Brennan Center’s Elizabeth Kennedy insists in the Huffington Post that the “real roadblock” to comprehensive campaign reform is the “constrained, impoverished view of corruption articulated by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority” in Citizens United.

In her academic round-up, Amanda Frost of this blog reports on a recent empirical study of the Supreme Court’s use of legal scholarship over the past sixty years, noting that “the frequency with which the Court explicitly refers to the legal scholarship belies claims that academic writing is irrelevant to the practice of law.”

Briefly:

-          The Associated Press (via USA Today) reports that Justice Sotomayor is expected to appear on the new season of Sesame Street, which begins its forty-second season on PBS.

-          The blog Sentencing Law and Policy has excerpts from (and commentary on) a recent New York Times essay by Emily Bazelon (which James covered on Monday) highlighting the divergent leadership styles of Justice Sotomayor and Kagan.

-          Howard Bashman at the Legal Intelligencer provides a follow-up article to his recent report on how the Third Circuit fared in the Court’s most recent Term.  His first article, published last month, is available here.