Tuesday round-up
on Dec 31, 2013 at 7:47 am
Briefly:
- In The Washington Post, Robert Barnes observes that although, “[a]s smart as they are, Supreme Court justices sometimes falter when they predict the consequences of their decisions,” Justice Antonin Scalia’s predictions on same-sex marriage – made in his dissent in United States v. Windsor – are now “being borne out” in the lower courts.
- In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, former Michigan governor John Engler urges the Court to grant cert. in Whirlpool Corp. v. Glazer and Sears, Roebuck and Company v. Butler, two challenges to a lower court’s certification of a class action in litigation involving washing machines. Engler warns that if the decision below is allowed to stand it will “open[] the door for every single consumer complaint to become a billion-dollar class action lawsuit,” and “the certain proliferation of such broad, cobbled-together lawsuits will eventually cripple U.S. manufacturing, and not just service-center employment.”
- In the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh previews next month’s oral arguments in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, in which the Court will consider the constitutionality of the president’s recess appointments to the NLRB.
- Jessica Gresko of the Associated Press reports on a gift that even Santa can’t deliver: bobbleheads of the Justices, produced by law professor Ross Davies.
- In a series of posts (here, here, and here) at Dorf on Law, Michael Dorf discusses the likelihood that the Court will stay a federal district judge’s decision invalidating Utah’s ban on same-sex marriages, as well as the possible timing of the Court’s actions and the impact that a ruling reversing the lower court could have on the same-sex marriages already performed in that state.
- At Constitutional Law Prof Blog, Ruthann Robson looks at the Court’s 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland, holding that the installation and use of a “pen register” to record the telephone numbers dialed by a suspect did not constitute a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, so that no warrant was required, and what it might mean for the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
Happy New Year to all of our readers – we’ll be back on January 2, 2014!
