Thursday round-up
With the sixtieth anniversary of the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education now just two days away, Education Week devotes much of its current issue to the case and its legacy. Lesli A. Maxwell looks at what it “mean[s] to have desegregated schools in 2014” (here) and at how one Kentucky county “may be the community where public schools come closest to keeping up the promise of the” Court’s decision (here). Mark Walsh examines the role of federal enforcement after Brown (here) and at the still-ongoing legal battles in one Mississippi city (here). And at ACSblog, Mark Tushnet looks at “the struggle for historical memory” after the Court’s decision in Brown, particularly in the Court’s 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
Briefly:
- In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse revisits the Court’s 2008 decision in Baze v. Rees, in which the Court rejected a challenge to Kentucky’s lethal injection protocol. She observes that “[t]he problems that some justices described in their opinions [in Baze] as unduly alarmist or unsubstantiated were the very problems that occurred” during a recent botched execution in Oklahoma.
- In his column for The Atlantic, Garrett Epps discusses the Court’s recent decision in Navarette v. California, in which the Court held that a traffic stop based on an anonymous tip did not violate the Constitution because police had reasonable suspicion to believe that the driver was drunk. Epps criticizes what he describes as the “legal mummery involved . . . with one side solemnly pretending to know facts they don’t and the other pretending not to know facts they do” as “unsettling.”
- In an op-ed at CNN, Eric Segall argues that there “are (at least) two fundamental changes that we need to make to the Supreme Court of the United States”: oral arguments and opinion announcements at the Court should be televised, and the Constitution should be amended to give the Justices “fixed terms and a salary for life,” which will “provide[] much-needed judicial independence without the downsides of life tenure.”
- At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re explains why, when he read Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, in which the Court upheld Michigan’s ban on the use of affirmative action by public universities, he “found [him]self thinking about Quidditch, that favorite game of constitutional scholars and other wizards.”
- At her Angry Bear blog, Beverly Mann has two posts (here and here) on Town of Greece v. Galloway, in which the Court upheld a New York town’s practice of starting its town council meetings with a prayer.
- Three years after the Court’s decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, in which the Court held that arbitration agreements are enforceable even if they require consumer complaints to be arbitrated individually, rather than on a class-action basis, Andrew Pincus looks at the current state of arbitration in a guest column for The American Lawyer.
- At Lawfare, Ingrid Wuerth anticipates the Court’s decision in Bond v. United States, in which the Court is considering the scope of Congress’s treaty power, and contends that the Chief Justice’s opinions in cases involving foreign affairs “might have lasting significance for foreign relations law that rivals or even surpasses” those of other Justices regarded as leaders in the field.
[Disclosure: Kevin Russell of Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Schuette. However, I am not affiliated with the firm.]
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