Friday round-up

AMY HOWE JAN 17, 2014 8:55 AM

Last June, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which contained the formula used to identify the states and local governments which are required to comply with the Act’s preapproval requirement.  Yesterday members of Congress introduced a bill in response to that ruling; among other things, the bill ties coverage under the preapproval requirement to recent voting rights violations.  Emma Dumain reports on the bill and the press conference at which it was introduced for Roll Call.  At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen analyzes the bill and concludes that, “if this were the bill introduced in 2006 to amend the VRA, it would not only have passed both Houses of Congress and become law, the Supreme Court would have been very likely to uphold the measure as constitutional despite its constitutional problems.”  Having said that, however, he also is “pessimistic that with the general dysfunction of Congress in particular and antagonism over singling out certain states now, the Act will pass out of Congress.”

Briefly:

• At PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman analyzes Tuesday’s opinion in Daimler AG v. Bauman, in which the Court held that Daimler cannot be sued in California for injuries allegedly caused by its Argentine subsidiary outside the United States.
• Also at PrawfsBlawg, Nancy Leong analyzes some of the arguments that Utah made in its brief at the Supreme Court seeking a stay of the district court’s decision striking down its ban on same-sex marriage.
• At the Blog of Legal Times, Tony Mauro dissects an exchange between two of the Justices and an attorney at Tuesday’s oral argument in Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States.
• At the Constitutional Accountability Center’s Text and History blog, David H. Gans has an overview of the pending challenges by religiously affiliated employers to the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate — including the one by the Little Sisters of the Poor, who have asked the Court to block their obligation to comply with the law.
• At The Washington Independent Review of Books, Jeremy Leaming interviews Alexander Wohl, the author of a biography of Justice Tom Clark and his son Ramsey Clark, who served as the attorney general in the Lyndon Johnson administration.

[Disclosure:  Kevin Russell of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the respondents in Bauman.  However, the author of this post is not affiliated with the firm.]

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