Thursday round-up

By Kiran Bhat
on Dec 22, 2011 at 9:21 am

Yesterday the parties in the Texas redistricting cases filed their opening briefs.  Lyle Denniston reports on the arguments made by both sides in a post for this blog.

Newt Gingrich’s recent criticism of the Court and the federal judiciary continue to generate coverage and commentary. Greg Stohr of Bloomberg reports that Gingrich “has plenty of company among Republican candidates in vowing to blow up long-held premises of constitutional law.”  In a guest column for the Des Moines Register, law professor Mark Kende argues that although Gingrich has criticized “activist judges,” he is in fact “the real activist who would push the nation into a potential constitutional crisis when he ignores Supreme Court rulings.” In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson suggests that one “irony to Gingrich’s railing against judicial dictatorship is that it comes at the very moment when the Supreme Court is more conservative than it has been since it began upholding New Deal legislation in 1937.” Meanwhile, at Slate, Eric Posner argues that Gingrich’s ideas “deserve serious consideration”, and that “[t]he attack on judicial supremacy is a big idea, and even a good idea, but it is not one whose time is ripe.” Finally, at the Washington Post’s Behind the Numbers blog, American University professor Danny Hayes points to polls showing that “the notion at the core of Gingrich’s criticism — that the court is an inherently political institution, not merely an objective arbiter of justice — is embraced by much of the public.”

Briefly:

• The Associated Press reports that the Court denied cert. in the case of Mississippi death row inmate Roger Gillett.
• Jesse L. Bonner of the Associated Press (via The Republic of Columbus, Indiana) reports on a cert. petition filed yesterday asking the Court to review a decision by the Ninth Circuit that prohibited a now-defunct Idaho charter school from using the Bible and other religious texts in the classroom.
• Mike Sacks of the Huffington Post creates a “short list” of potential nominees to the Court should a Republican win the 2012 presidential election.
• At Balkanization, Frank Pasquale discusses recent scholarship analyzing the Court’s decisions in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. and Citizens United, which he criticizes as “the jurisprudence . . . of a corrupted hybrid economy devoted to little more than maximizing the wealth of CEOs and Wall Street grandees.”  [Disclosure:  Goldstein & Russell, whose attorneys work for this blog in various capacities, represented respondent IMS Health in Sorrell.]
• Tom Ramstack of AHN (via GantDaily.com) reports that the Spanish-language media has taken a strong interest in Arizona v. United States, urging the Court to strike Arizona’s controversial immigration law.