Wednesday round-up

CONOR MCEVILY JUN 5, 2013 9:45 AM

Yesterday’s coverage of and commentary on the Court continued to focus on Monday’s decision in Maryland v. King, a five-to-four decision in which the Court upheld a Maryland law that authorizes the collection of DNA samples from individuals arrested for “serious crimes.”

Coverage of the decision in King comes from Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST, and Aaron Kase at Lawyers.com, while at Angry Bear Beverly Mann responds to an op-ed in The New York Times by Akhil Amar and Neal Katyal, who argue that the Court’s decision was correct and that Justice Scalia’s dissent “did not get . . . history quite right.”  Also focusing on Justice Scalia’s dissent in King was Joan Biskupic of Reuters, who observed that the Justice’s eleven-minute statement from the bench “employed forceful rhetoric as clever as it was heated.”  At Cato@Liberty, Walter Olson, Ilya Shapiro, Roger Pilon, Jim Harper, and Julian Sanchez all analyze the opinion, while at the Daily Beast Walter Olson speculates that “the new decision [might] fuel new rounds of legislation mandating unprecedented levels of personal search and data collection.”  Finally, News Genius, a service that allows the community to annotate primary sources, news, and other documents, provides the syllabus of the King decision for public commentary and cross reference.

At JURIST, Jaclyn Belczyk reports on Monday’s decision in Hillman v. Maretta, in which the Court unanimously held that a federal law which establishes a life insurance program for federal employees and allows an employee to designate a beneficiary to receive the proceeds of the policy when the employee dies preempts a Virginia law that allows the family of a deceased employee to sue the designated beneficiary for the proceeds if the beneficiary happens to be the employee’s former spouse.  And also at JURIST, Belczyk covers the two cases in which the Court recently granted cert., Lexmark International v. Static Control Components and United States v. Apel.

Briefly:

• Lyle Denniston of this blog reports that the Court will consider the government’s petition for certiorari in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, in which the government seeks review of the lower court’s decision holding that the president’s recess appointments to the NLRB violated the Constitution, at its private Conference on June 20.
• Also at this blog, Lyle reports that United States Forest Service v. Pacific Rivers Council, a test case on the court review of the federal government’s broad plans for reducing the risks of forest fires in the California mountains, is likely to be taken off the Court’s merits docket for the fall.
• Finally, John Elwood reviews Monday’s relisted cases for this blog.

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