Friday round-up
on May 16, 2014 at 8:01 am
Commentary on partisanship and the Court continues with an op-ed from Michael McGough of the Los Angeles Times, who describes himself as “struck by how the controversy over whether the Supreme Court justices have become more partisan in recent years parallels a phenomenon I discovered when writing about the Church of England: the ‘party bishop.’” And Scott Lemieux weighs in at The Week, writing that, although “Supreme Court voting is too complex to be explained by any single factor,” the “attitudinal model” – which posits that “Supreme Court votes are explained by what judges consider desirable policy” – “still contains a good deal of truth.”Briefly:
- At Angry Bear, Beverly Mann predicts that the Court’s decision in Bond v. United States will “be about separation of powers.” But, she asks, “separation of WHICH powers?”
- At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re discusses the cellphone privacy cases, United States v. Wurie and Riley v. California. He contends that, although “[t]he criminal defendants in these cases argue that new rules or exceptions should be created for new technologies, . . . this may be a situation where a new technology helps us see more clearly how old technologies (like diaries) should have been treated all along.”
- Today at noon and again on Saturday at 6 p.m., Kevin Russell discusses Brown v. Board of Education with C-SPAN Radio, which can be heard in the Washington, D.C., area at 90.1 and online at www.c-span.org.
[Disclosure: Russell is a partner in Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, was among the counsel to the petitioner in Riley at the certiorari stage, but he did not participate in the case at the merits stage. In any event, I am not affiliated with the firm.]