Monday round-up
on Jul 1, 2013 at 10:36 am
After last week’s flurry of decisions, the weekend’s clippings include further commentary on the Court’s decisions in the same-sex marriage and affirmative action cases, as well as the Term as a whole.
Broad coverage of the same-sex marriage cases, United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry, comes from Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal and Michael Kirkland of UPI. Writing for JURIST, Jessica Levinson summarizes the Court’s opinion in Perry, while Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury Newsreports on Perry and its implications for future challenges to same-sex marriage. At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost discusses the Court’s “ambiguous ruling” in the case, while at Constitution DailyDavid Gans praises both of the same-sex marriage decisions as “cause for celebration for all Americans across the political spectrum.” On a lighter note, Andy Suszek annotates Justice Scalia’s dissent in Windsor at his blog, More Than Twenty Cents. Buzzfeed’s Chris Geidner reports on the federal government’s recent announcement that it plans to implement the Court’s decision in Windsor quickly, making federal employees’ same-sex spouses eligible for the federal employee health insurance program and other benefits programs; in The New York Times, Julia Preston reports that in the wake of last week’s decision, the federal government has for the first time approved a permanent resident visa for a same-sex married couple.
The weekend’s coverage also focused on the decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, in which the Court ordered the Fifth Circuit to take a closer look at the university’s use of race in its undergraduate admissions process. At the Ogletree Deakins blog, John Carrigan summarizes the Court’s decision; in a separate post, he discusses what might happen on remand, noting that the university will have a “steep hill . . . to climb to show that no race-neutral alternatives serve the interest in diversity.” At SALTLAW, Vinay Harplani argues that the ruling in Fisher “merely defers the important issues for later consideration,” and he urges “proponents of affirmative action [to] declare victory for now, but also they should understand that their fight to defend race-conscious admissions policies will surely continue.” Finally, discussing the case in his column for the Hendersonville Times-News, LeRoy Goldman warns that affirmative action’s days could be numbered.
Finally, a number of articles examined the Term as a whole. Michael Doyle of McClatchy Newspapers provides an overview of the Term’s biggest decisions, with an emphasis on consequences both short term and long. The Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin concludes that the Court’s “most important ideological struggle isn’t between left and right, but the narrower divide of Chief Justice John Roberts’s conservatism and a libertarian streak championed by Justice Anthony Kennedy,” while USA Today’s Richard Wolf writes that “[u]nder Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s tenuous conservative majority doesn’t act quickly, but it acts eventually – and it doesn’t mind uprooting a few precedents or statutes along the way.”
Briefly:
- Writing for Forbes, Glenn Lammi criticizes those who have labeled the Court as “pro-business,” explaining that this “bromide is . . . trite and woefully simplistic.”
- Steve Vladeck of LawFare praises Justice Thomas’s dissent from the denial of certiorari in Lanus v. United States, in which the Justice suggested that the Court should have granted cert. to revisit the Feres doctrine.
- At PrawfsBlawg, Cynthia Godsoe and Kim Pearson discuss last week’s decision in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl in a trio of posts here, here, and here.
- In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse argues that this Term has revealed that “the real Chief Justice Roberts” is one who believes that “Congress can’t be trusted,” and that “[t]he executive branch is out of control.”
