Friday round-up
The fate of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Perry v. Brown continues to draw heavy coverage. Ariane de Vogue of ABC News discusses reactions to the decision from gay rights advocates who would prefer that the Court either decline to review the case or, at most, issue only a narrow opinion, while at Slate Will Oremus explains why gay-rights leaders don’t want this case to reach the Court at all. David Cole echoes this theme at the blog of the New York Review of Books, warning that (and explaining why) “a loss in the Supreme Court could set the gay rights movement back for decades.” Striking a different note, Dale Carpenter of the Volokh Conspiracy argues that “a loss in the Supreme Court could be much more narrow,” leaving open “other, more completely theorized, arguments for same-sex marriage”; Ilya Somin disagrees, contending that “[i]f the Supreme Court embraces Reinhardt’s reasoning, a state that enacts a civil union law would have to embrace gay marriage as well.” Finally, Adam Bink of The Huffington Post offers a general discussion of whether the Court is likely to grant cert., the potential timeline for Supreme Court review, and how the Court might ultimately rule on the merits. [Note: The author of this post will serve as a law clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, author of the Perry majority opinion, in 2013-2014, but he has not been involved in the Proposition 8 litigation.]
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-7 to advance a bill that would permit the Court to televise its proceedings if the Court were to change its mind and allow cameras. The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, C-SPAN, Reuters, Wired, and the Blog of the Legal Times all provide coverage.
Briefly:
- Jeremy Leaming of ACSblog reports on reactions to Justice Ginsburg’s comments to an Egyptian interviewer that there are other governing documents, such as South Africa’s constitution, that she might consult if she were to draft a constitution “in the year 2012.”
- Brian Wolfman previews Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific, in which the Court will consider whether a federal statute that authorizes an award of costs for the services of interpreters to the prevailing party in a lawsuit also allows for an award of costs associated with translating written documents.
- Robert Barnes of the Washington Post reports on a wave of challenges to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, noting that they are quickly working their way toward the Court.
- A federal district judge in New York has ruled that the federal government must disclose internal e-mails to reveal whether it may have misled the Supreme Court about its policies on helping improperly deported immigrants return to the United States in Nken v. Holder. Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal has coverage of the story, which Kiran also included in yesterday’s round-up.
- Lyle reports on a request by the health care challengers for argument time equal to that of the federal government.
- At Reason Magazine, Peter Suderman discusses the Medicare coercion issue in the healthcare cases, concluding that “[s]tates allied with the federal government and allowed themselves to become dependent on its health care handouts—and now they’re paying the price.”
- At CNN, Al Goodman reports that the Court has declined to hear an emergency application for a stay filed by a Florida deep-sea salvage company that is embroiled in a dispute with Spain over ownership of a recently discovered sunken treasure.
- The New York Times Bats Blog reports that “the Mets’ owners have asked the Supreme Court for help in their legal battle to prove they did not turn a blind eye to indications that Bernard L. Madoff had been running a fraud over more than two decades.” The Associated Press (via Bloomberg Businessweek) also provides coverage.
- The Washington Post has posted a visual representation of efforts to map laughter on the Supreme Court in the 2006 Term; Justice Scalia prevails as the funniest Justice.
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