Thursday round-up

AMY HOWE JUL 24, 2014 4:07 PM

The Coalition for Court Transparency released a report on transparency at the Supreme Court during the October Term 2013.  It concluded that the Term ended “with only modest improvements to [the Court’s] overall openness.”  Tony Mauro covered the report for Legal Times.

Other coverage of the Court focused on Tuesday’s decisions by the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the D.C. and Fourth Circuits, reaching conflicting conclusions on challenges to the operation of a provision of the Affordable Care Act.  Writing for this blog, Tom Goldstein discussed the likelihood that the Court will take up the issue, and – if so — how the Justices might rule.  Other Court-related coverage of the D.C. and Fourth Circuit decisions comes from Sahil Kapur at Talking Points Memo.  (Note:  As one might expect, Tuesday’s decisions garnered substantial coverage, but we have only included posts whose primary focus is the Supreme Court.) 

On Tuesday the Court lifted the stay of execution entered by the Ninth Circuit in the case of Joseph Wood, who had asked the courts to put his execution on hold until Arizona provided him with more information about its lethal injection process.  On Wednesday the Court denied another application by Wood for a stay, and the state carried out the execution yesterday afternoon.  I covered the Court-related events for this blog; other coverage comes from Kent Scheidegger at Crime and Consequences.

Briefly:

• The Federalist Society’s website hosts a podcast by Dean Mazzone and Kent Scheidegger, who review the Court’s criminal law docket from the October Term 2013.
• At the National Law Journal’s Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle report on the Justices’ summer travel schedule, which includes teaching gigs in Europe, book tour events for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and appearances at the judicial conferences of the federal courts of appeals.
• In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse discusses last week’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the challenge (on remand from the Supreme Court) to the undergraduate admissions policies used by the University of Texas at Austin.  She suggests that the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in the case succeeded, “in Supreme Court jargon,” in “‘cert-proof[ing]’ it” – that is, making “the case an unappealing candidate for further Supreme Court review (that is, for a grant of certiorari, or cert.).”
• At The Daily Beast, Jeff Greenfield addresses calls for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire to allow President Obama to appoint her successor by countering that “there’s really no chance President Obama will be able to appoint another Justice to the bench, regardless of what happens in November.”

A friendly reminder:  We rely on our readers to send us links for the round-up.  If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.  Until the end of the summer, we will have twice-weekly round-ups (Tuesday and Thursday); daily round-ups will resume in the fall.  Thank you!

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