Friday round-up
on Feb 28, 2014 at 8:23 am
Although the Court did not hear oral arguments yesterday, oral arguments were nonetheless the big news relating to the Court yesterday, with the online release of bootleg videos – believed to be the first ones ever – taken at the Court. Greg Stohr covered the release of the videos for Bloomberg News, while Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall did the same for The Wall Street Journal. And at the first casualty blog, Victoria Kwan connects the unauthorized videos with the oral arguments that they capture.
Looking ahead to next month’s oral argument in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, Georgetown University Law Center has posted an authorized courtroom video – of a mock oral argument in the case.
Other coverage of the Court looks back at Tuesday’s decision in Kaley v. United States, in which the Court held that a criminal defendant whose assets have been frozen before his trial has no right to a pre-trial hearing to challenge the probable cause for his indictment, even if he needs the frozen funds to pay for his defense. (I reported on the decision for this blog that day.) In his column for The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen criticizes the Chief Justice’s dissent in the case, arguing that it is “such a backhanded defense of the right to counsel that it’s barely a defense at all.” At Reason.com’s Hit and Run Blog, Damon Root has a different take on the dissent, which he characterizes as getting “it right. Our criminal justice system only works when both sides get the opportunity to put their best case forward. Something has gone very wrong when the deck is stacked so heavily against those who still remain innocent until proven guilty.”
