Tuesday round-up

AMY HOWE JUL 29, 2014 11:28 AM

Some coverage of the Court focuses on recent decisions by the courts of appeals striking down state bans on same-sex marriage and the likelihood that the Supreme Court will take up the issue.  (Because the round-up only focuses on news relating to the Court, here and elsewhere we do not include coverage of issues such as same-sex marriage, the death penalty, and the challenges to the Affordable Care Act that are not focused primarily on the Supreme Court.)  In The New York Times, Adam Liptak looks at a concurring opinion in the Tenth Circuit, in which Judge Jerome Holmes indicated that “animus toward gay people had played no role in the ban” that the court of appeals was striking down; that statement, Liptak suggests, “may foreshadow a problem for gay rights advocates at the Supreme Court.” 

At the Text and History Blog, Brianne Gorod outlines why, in her view, the Supreme Court may not weigh in on the latest challenges to the Affordable Care Act – specifically, to the availability of tax subsidies for individuals who bought health insurance on federally facilitated exchanges.   By contrast, in his column for BlueRidgeNow.com, LeRoy Goldman urges the Court to step in, arguing that “[t]hese cases present an issue of grave constitutional consequence that goes far beyond the subsidies.”

Briefly:

• Nina Totenberg of NPR traces the legal evolution of the status of corporations in the Court’s cases.
• At ISCOTUSnow (video), Debbie Davidson analyzes the Court’s recent decision in Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoffer, holding that fiduciaries of an employee stock ownership plan are generally subject to the same duty of prudence that applies to Employee Retirement Income Security Act fiduciaries.
• On Saturday at 6 p.m., C-SPAN Radio will air the 1974 oral argument in United States v. Nixon, in which the Court held that then-President Richard Nixon must provide audiotapes of conversations from the Oval Office to a special prosecutor.
• At The Legal Pulse, Mark Chenoweth lists his “NOT Top 10” – the ten cases that he believes the Justices erroneously declined to review during the October Term 2013.
• Greenwire’s Jeremy P. Jacobs considers what the Court’s ruling last month in Scialabba v. Cuellar de Osorio, upholding the interpretation by the Board of Immigration Appeals of the Child Status Protection Act, might mean for challenges to the EPA’s greenhouse gas standards for power plants.
• In another post at the Text and History Blog, Gorod argues that “conservatives can’t claim exclusive ownership of the text and history of the Constitution anymore.  In fact, the Supreme Court’s relatively liberal justices have more and more begun joining their conservative colleagues in embracing the Constitution’s text and history.”

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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