Monday round-up
on Jul 7, 2014 at 11:23 am
The Court is now in the first full week of its summer recess, which means that wrap-ups of the Term abound. In her review of the Term, NPR’s Nina Totenberg observes that the unanimity which often prevailed at the Court “is illusory, often just a technical agreement on the bottom line of a case — who won and who lost,” and that “who won or lost is not all that important in Supreme Court cases, because it is the legal principle laid down by the majority that must be followed by the lower courts.” At The Economist, Steven Mazie suggests that the Court “quietly pave[d] the way for big changes” in the future, and he predicts that questions involving same-sex marriage are likely to return to the Court very soon. The ACLU released its list (in a pdf) of major civil liberties decisions of the Term, while MoloLamken (also in a pdf) summarized major business cases of the Term.
The Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding that closely held companies with strong religious objections are not required to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, continues to generate coverage and commentary, as does the Court’s order on Thursday exempting Wheaton College from having to comply with the regulations promulgated to accommodate religious non-profits that object to the mandate. Lyle covered the Thursday order for this blog, with further analysis from both Marty Lederman and Tom Goldstein (here and here). Other coverage of the Wheaton College order comes from Bill Mears and Tom Cohen of CNN, Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal, Commentary on the Hobby Lobby decision more broadly comes from Marty Lederman at Balkinization, Leland Beck at the Federal Regulations Advisor, Steven Mazie at The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Ilya Shapiro at the Federalist, and Katerina Souliopoulos at the blog of Harvard’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation.
Briefly:
- Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News reports on the role of Stanford Law School students in Riley v. California, in which the Court held that police must generally obtain a warrant to review the contents of an arrestee’s cellphone.
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