Monday round-up

The weekend’s coverage focused on the upcoming oral arguments in Arizona v. United States, in which the Court will consider the constitutionality of several provisions of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s immigration law. Lyle previews the case for this blog; James Vicini of Reuters, Robert Barnes of the Washington Post, David Savage of the Los Angeles Times, Julia Preston of the New York Times, Jess Bravin and  Miriam Jordan of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Michael Doyle of McClatchy Newspapers (via the Miami Herald), Caroline Ward and Dan Freedman of the Houston Chronicle, and Mike Sacks of the Huffington Post also have coverage. The New York Times highlights this issue in its “Room for Debate” feature, while the paper’s editorial board urges the Court to invalidate the law, arguing that “if allowed to stand, it opens the door to states’ writing their own foreign policy, in defiance of the Constitution.” And in an op-ed for the New York Times, Peter Spiro argues that the Court should uphold the law because “the problem [created by restrictive immigration laws] will largely self-correct,” but “judicial intervention risks generating its own backlash.”

Briefly:

• At the Washington Post, columnist George Will urges the Court to hold unconstitutional life-without-parole sentences for juveniles in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs; Will argues that, given what new science reveals about the adolescent brain, “denying juveniles even a chance for parole defeats the penal objective of rehabilitation.” The editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer reaches the same conclusion.
• UPI‘s Michael Kirkland discusses the Court’s recent cert. grant in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in which the Justices will consider how two provisions of the federal Copyright Act apply to a copy that was made and legally acquired abroad, but then imported into the United States.
• At this blog, Ronald Mann analyzes Wednesday’s opinion in Kappos v. Hyatt, in which the Court held that there are no limitations on a patent applicant’s ability to introduce new evidence in a 35 U.S.C. § 145 proceeding beyond those already present in the Federal Rules of Evidence and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
• Robert Barnes of the Washington Post discusses the difficulties lawyers face when making arguments based on legislative history to the Justices.
• Greg Stohr and Henry Goldman of Bloomberg News report on Harmon v. Kimmel, one of the cases on last week’s Conference, in which a New York City landlord is challenging the constitutionality of that city’s rent-stabilization law.
• At Forbes, Ilya Shapiro and Timothy Sandefur caution President Obama against accusing the Court of judicial activism if it strikes down the individual mandate, reasoning that “our Court plays a crucial role in the system of checks and balances that protects the rights of minorities and individuals who lack political influence.”