Thursday round-up

By Kiran Bhat
on Oct 20, 2011 at 2:39 pm

Coverage of the Court continued to be relatively quiet yesterday.  Retired Justice John Paul Stevens, who recently released his memoir Five Chiefs, sat for interviews with both Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air and Charlie Rose. Garrett Epps of the Atlantic calls Stevens’s memoir a “rare glance into the Supreme Court,” but he also expresses regret that the Justice did not provide a more extensive description of his life. And writing at the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, Richard Epstein both praises and criticizes the Justice’s jurisprudence, contending that “[s]ome of Stevens’ opinions are landmarks in the law” while “[o]thers should be relegated to the dustbin of legal history.”  (H/t to Howard Bashman of How Appealing for the last link.)

This week’s filings in the challenges to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act – which Lyle covered here and here – generated coverage from Joan Biskupic of the USA Today, Mark Sherman of the Associated Press, and Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal.

Finally, Monday’s grant of certiorari in United States v. Alvarez, in which the Court will consider the constitutionality of a law prohibiting false claims about military combat decorations, prompted additional commentary yesterday.   In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Turley characterizes the law as a “direct attack on free speech,” while the editorial board of the New Jersey Star-Ledger argues that “the court must rule on the side of free speech, even if the lie it protects makes our skin crawl.”

Briefly:

• At CNN, Bill Mears covers Justice Kagan’s remarks during the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of a Baltimore synagogue.
• At the ABA Journal, Debra Cassens Weiss has coverage of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the affirmative action case in which a petition for certiorari was filed last month.
• Also at the ABA Journal, Weiss reports on recent remarks by Justice Scalia, who predicted that the Court will overrule its decision in the eminent domain case Kelo v. City of New London. Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy also discusses the remarks, describing himself as “somewhat less certain” that the decision will be overruled.
• Mark Sherman of the Associated Press covers a new report proposing changes in federal laws to allow the Court to keep operating if several Justices were the simultaneous targets of a terrorist attack.
• Daniel Fisher of Forbes predicts the outcomes of several of this Term’s high-profile cases.