Friday round-up
At the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Text and History blog, Tom Donnelly provides six reasons to “keep an eye on” next week’s oral arguments in EPA v. EME Homer City Generation and American Lung Association v. EME Homer City Generation, a challenge to the EPA’s interstate air pollution rule. As Lyle Denniston reported yesterday for this blog, the Court has expanded the oral argument time for the consolidated cases, from sixty to ninety minutes total.
Briefly:
- In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Richard Garnett weighs in on the dispute over the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, which the Court will review later this Term. Garnett observes that when then-President Bill Clinton signed the law at the heart of the challenges, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he “challenged us instead to ‘bring our values back to the table of American discourse to heal our troubled land,’” and he contends that Hobby Lobby and the family who owns the stores, “by refusing to check their faith at the marketplace door, are doing just that.”
- At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger previews next week’s argument in White v. Woodall, which he describes as asking the Court to decide how a federal court should “apply the so-called ‘deference’ standard of 28 USC §2254(d)(1) when the ‘clearly established federal law’ that the habeas petitioner seeks to invoke was established in a different context? Can he stitch together pieces of cases into a legal quilt to extend the rule he needs to new territory and ask the federal court to declare the state court’s refusal to do so ‘unreasonable,’ so as to satisfy Congress’s standard for an override of the state decision in federal court?” The answer, Scheidegger contends, “is ‘no,’ and despite some unfortunate dicta I think it is quite clearly ‘no.’”
- At The Economist’s business travel blog Gulliver, Steven Mazie reports on this week’s oral argument in Northwest, Inc. v. Ginsberg, a dispute between a frequent flier and the airline that terminated his membership in the company’s frequent-flier program. Mazie concludes that “[t]he tenor of the argument on Tuesday suggests that Rabbi Ginsberg will not have his miles returned any time soon.”
- At ACSblog, Erwin Chemerinsky discussed Wednesday’s oral argument in United States v. Apel, in which he represents the respondent, an anti-war protester challenging his banishment from a military base in California. Chemerinsky contends that “[m]ilitary bases are uniquely important as a place to protest the military’s activities. A public road outside of a closed military base, especially in a designated protest zone, is a place where all should be able to peacefully protest.”
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