Thursday round-up

As Lyle reported for this blog early yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit declined to block a federal judge’s order striking down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriages.  At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen discusses the prospect that the Court will once again take up the question of same-sex marriage and predicts that, although the Court could grant a stay in the Utah case, “within a year or two this case or another will make it to the Court in a way that leads the Court to decide the same-sex marriage issue on the merits.  There are just too many questions, and so much litigation, for the Court to avoid the merits for too long.”

Briefly:

• In her last column for the Boston Review before joining the Department of Justice, Pamela Karlan looks at “unusual alliances” at the Court and suggests that “[c]ases that produce seemingly strange bedfellows are both a source of the Constitution’s responsiveness to change and a signal of that change.”
• At MSNBC, Adam Serwer discusses the influence that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s concurring opinion in United States v. Jones, in which the Court invalidated a conviction that rested in part on evidence obtained by placing a GPS tracking device on a suspected drug dealer’s car without a warrant, had on U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the National Security Agency’s data gathering program is likely unconstitutional.  (Lyle reported on that ruling in a post for this blog.)
• In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse considers what Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Thurgood Marshall might have thought of the new exhibit on the Constitution at the National Archives.
• At ISCOTUSnow, Carolyn Shapiro previews (in a video) to next month’s oral argument in NLRB v. Noel Canning, the challenge to the president’s recess appointments to the NLRB.
• At the blog More Than Twenty Cents, Andrew Suszek provides a “dose of SCOTUS holiday cheer” in the form of an annotated transcript of part of the November oral argument in Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which the Court is considering the constitutionality of the town’s practice of beginning its council meetings with a prayer.

In a recent filing in the district court, Wiley Rein defended its request for legal fees in its successful challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.  The Court ruled in favor of the firm’s clients last summer, in Shelby County v. Holder.  Zoe Tillman covers the story for the Blog of Legal Times.