Monday round-up

Briefly:

• Mark Sherman of the Associated Press (via The Washington Post) examines the diversity of the Supreme Court bar, noting that “[i]n an era when three women, a Hispanic and an African-American sit on the court and white men constitute a bare majority of the nine justices, the court is more diverse than the lawyers who argue before it.”
• UPI’s Michael Kirkland discusses retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent remarks to the Chicago Tribune, in which she expressed doubts about the Court’s cert. grant in Bush v. Gore; Kirkland observes that the “ultimate irony” is that even if the Court had not taken the case, “the odds are good [that] then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush still would have won the presidency.” [Disclosure: The law firm of Thomas C. Goldstein, P.C., now known as Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys work for or contribute to this blog in various capacities, was among the counsel to respondent Al Gore in that case.]
• With the Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, expected in the next six weeks, Roger Clegg argues in the National Review Online that the information recently released by the Census Bureau about voter turnout in 2012 “further undermines the constitutionality of the distinctions made by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act between the jurisdictions it covers and those it does not.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., is among the counsel to Representative F. James Sensenbrenner et al., who filed an amicus brief in support of the respondent in this case.]
• At the Constitutional Accountability Center, David Gans responds to Clegg’s post, countering that “the Voting Rights Act is not simply about increasing African American voter turnout, but about preventing all forms of voting discrimination.”
• David Savage of the Los Angeles Times reports Elmbrook School District v. Doe, one of the petitions considered at last week’s Conference, which asks the Court to decide whether a public high school violates the Establishment Clause when it holds its graduation ceremony in a local church.
• At Minding the Campus, Roger Clegg urges the Justices – in light of their upcoming decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin – to take note of a recent article in The New York Times which reports that when racial preferences were abolished for university admissions in California, the state was forced to make reforms that helped disadvantaged students of all racial and ethnic groups. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., represented the American Association of Law Schools as an amicus in this case.]

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