Monday round-up
on Dec 17, 2012 at 9:59 am
Once again, the weekend’s coverage focused on the Court’s decision last week to grant cert. in United States v. Windsor, the challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California Proposition 8. At this blog, Lyle reports that the Court has set the briefing schedule for the Windsor case, although no date has been set for oral argument. UPI‘s Michael Kirkland previews the case, with an emphasis on the role played by Edie Windsor, the eighty-three-year-old “same-sex marriage warrior” behind the lawsuit. Sahil Kapur of Talking Points Memo (h/t Howard Bashman) reports that gay rights advocates are optimistic about their chances of winning Justice Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote; however, James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal counters that, although Justice Kennedy’s “moralizing rhetoric” suggests that he may be “activist and results-oriented” on this issue, “there’s nothing in the legal logic of [Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas] that makes a constitutional right to same-sex marriage inexorable.” Finally, in his column for the Chicago Tribune, Bill Press urges Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself from the case, given his public statements on the issue.
Briefly:
- In an op-ed for the National Law Journal, Khin Mai Aung and Robert Toone – co-authors of the amicus brief filed by the Asian American Legal Defense Education Fund in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin – argue that Asian Americans benefit from affirmative action policies because the resulting diversity “enriches their education and prepares them for careers in the global workplace.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys work for or contribute to this blog in various capacities, represented the American Association of Law Schools as an amicus in this case.]
- On Thursday night, Justice Elena Kagan spoke at Washington’s Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. The Associated Press and Politico‘s Tal Kopan have coverage of the event, in which she discussed her dissents and praised Justice Scalia’s contributions to the field of statutory interpretation.
- At this blog, Lyle reports that on Friday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to block enforcement of a new detention law that appears to expand the executive branch’s power to detain individuals believed to have aided or supported a terrorist network.
- Mark Sherman of the Associated Press reports that “[t]he next big issue in the national debate over guns – whether people have a right to be armed in public –is moving closer to Supreme Court review” in the wake of the Seventh Circuit’s recent decision striking down Chicago’s concealed-carry ban. At The Atlantic, Garrett Epps argues that both Judge Posner (the author of the Seventh Circuit opinion) and Justice Scalia display “a callous indifference to consequences [that] disfigures both the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases and reveals a flip attitude toward the problems of those who must live their lives outside federal courthouses surrounded by metal detectors and marshals.”
