Friday round-up
on Nov 4, 2011 at 10:12 am
Coverage of this past week’s oral arguments continues, as does speculation about what next week’s arguments – and the remainder of the Term – will hold.
Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, Greg Stohr and Alex Wayne explore the prospect that the Court could strike down the individual mandate but leave the rest of the Affordable Care Act intact. Such a scenario could create, one health care analyst contends, “the worst of all worlds for insurers”; they would still be required to cover sick people, “who are likely to cost far more in benefits than they pay in premiums.”
Following Wednesday’s oral arguments in Perry v. New Hampshire, the Washington Post‘s Robert Barnes reports that the Court “seemed reluctant . . . to create additional constitutional barriers” to the admission of eyewitness testimony. Notwithstanding such prognostications (which Kiran also covered in yesterday’s round-up), the editorial board of the New York Times urged the Court to require close scrutiny of eyewitness identifications in light of “the overwhelming scientific evidence . . . about the risk of inaccurate identifications” and “decades of studies showing that misidentification is the leading cause wrongful convictions are admissible.”
Lyle Denniston of this blog previews Monday’s oral arguments in Zivotofsky v. Clinton, characterizing the case as a “historic contest of constitutional power” that will test “the core authority of all three branches.” Also at this blog, Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher interviews retired Justice John Paul Stevens about his recent memoir, Five Chiefs. And Timothy Coates recaps Tuesday’s arguments in Rehberg v. Paulk, while Giovanna Shay reports on oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Thaler.
At the Christian Science Monitor’s DC Decoder Blog, Peter Grier discusses the federal ban on protests in front of the Court, noting that there is little hope for an “Occupy the Supreme Court” movement anytime soon. And in an op-ed in the Washington Post, the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis advocates for exactly such a movement.
Briefly:
- USA Today’s Joan Biskupic reports that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just “received a clean bill of health.”
