Monday round-up

MARISSA MILLER SEP 10, 2012 10:32 AM

This weekend’s clippings focus on Justice Elena Kagan’s recent remarks to law students at the University of Michigan and the same-sex marriage cases that could be at the Court on the merits this Term.

On Friday morning, Justice Kagan offered an inside look at the Court to law students at the University of Michigan. Justice Kagan told the crowd that the Court’s Justices are not motivated to rule in certain cases to favor or disfavor a particular president and that even the politically divergent members of the Court genuinely like and respect one another.  The Detroit News, AnnArbor.com, and the law school’s news release provide coverage.

Other coverage focused on the challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, both of which the Court has been asked to take up this Term.  UPI’s Michael Kirkland reports on the various challenges to DOMA, while at Reuters Joan Biskupic examines both cases in the context of the Court’s gay law clerks and employees, interviewing “more than a dozen people who are gay and have worked at the Court.”  Although her interviews revealed a culture of acceptance that cut across ideological lines, Biskupic cautions that it is “difficult to draw conclusions about how a Justice’s personal involvement with gay people might influence rulings.”

Briefly:

• This blog continues its symposium on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin with a post by Michael Rosman.
• At the Daily Beast, Daniel Klaidman looks at the Chief Justice’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate in the context of his life and career.
• The Associated Press’s Mark Sherman reports that a Latino civil rights group has filed a cert. petition asking the Court to stop Texas from using congressional districts drawn by a federal court in San Antonio because the district lines discriminate against minorities.
• The Georgetown Law Supreme Court Institute’s annual Term Preview Report, which summarizes the cases on the Court’s docket for the upcoming Term, is now available at the Institute’s website.
• At Concurring Opinions, Kyle Graham imagines a series of unsent emails from Justice Scalia to Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, who has criticized the Justice’s most recent book.

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