Thursday round-up
on Dec 19, 2013 at 7:36 am
In a series of posts consolidated in a Word document at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh takes a close look at the issues in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, while Matt Bowman responds in a guest post. In an op-ed for USA Today, Robert George argues that there is a double standard between the federal government’s litigating position in the challenges to the mandate and the exemptions from the mandate that the federal government has granted in other contexts.
Briefly:
- At an event on Tuesday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rejected the idea that Justices should plan their retirements to allow a president from the party that named them to the Court to appoint their successors, telling an audience instead that a Justice should stay “as long as she can do the job.” At Slate, Emily Bazelon contends that, “[e]ven if you think it’s delusional to see the Supreme Court as anything but political, scolding Ginsburg about staying on isn’t working.”
- At ACSblog, Kent Greenfield suggests that Harris v. Quinn, in which the Court will consider whether a group of home health care workers funded by Medicaid are state employees and therefore required to pay their “fair share” of the costs of union representation, could be the “sleeper case” of the Term.
- Yesterday the federal government filed its brief in a challenge to the ban on demonstrations on the grounds of the Court. Tony Mauro reports for the Blog of Legal Times.
