Thursday round-up
on Aug 28, 2014 at 7:20 am
Briefly:
- In The National Law Journal’s Supreme Court Brief (registration or subscription required), Tony Mauro reports on the reorganization of the Supreme Court Clerk’s Office in the wake of the upcoming retirement (effective September 1) of Chief Deputy Clerk Chris Vasil. (Lyle Denniston also reported on these developments for this blog.)
- Elsewhere in the Supreme Court Brief, Marcia Coyle covers a new filing by the Florida Bar, which “has taken the unusual step of urging, instead of opposing, U.S. Supreme Court review of a state ethics rule prohibiting judicial candidates from personally soliciting contributions.” Other coverage comes from Nathan Hale at Law360 (subscription or registration required).
- In The Atlantic, Garrett Epps suggests that, as Chief Justice John Roberts begins his tenth Term, “his quest for a non-partisan Court seems in retrospect like the impossible dream.”
- At Talking Points Memo, Sahil Kapur reports on recent developments in the town of Greece, New York – whose practice of beginning its town council meetings with a prayer was upheld by the Court earlier this year. The town has adopted a new policy that, according to one secular group, “excludes non-religious citizens and potentially shuts out faiths that aren’t well-established in the town.”
- In a post at Concurring Opinions, Ron Collins (also of this blog) discusses an article by Randy Kozel on the Court’s First Amendment caselaw and the “purported demise of stare decisis”; Kozel concludes that “the Court’s practice raises serious questions,” arguing that “[i]f the doctrine of stare decisis is to serve its core functions of stabilizing and unifying constitutional law across time, the desire to protect expressive liberty must yield, at least occasionally, to the need for keeping faith with the past.”
- In Idaho, Justice Antonin Scalia gave the keynote speech at an event to celebrate the end of the adjudication of claims to water from the Snake River Basin there. Scalia praised the completion of the adjudication (which took nearly three decades) as “a great state triumph.” The Idaho Statesman has a report.
- At The Volokh Conspiracy, William Baude discusses Jones v. United States, a petition scheduled for the Court’s September 29 Conference. At issue in the case is whether common-law rules can rely on judge-found facts to justify a longer federal sentence.
- In an op-ed for The New York Times, Erwin Chemerinsky discusses events in Ferguson, Missouri, and argues that, “if the conclusion is that the officer, Darren Wilson, acted improperly, the ability to hold him or Ferguson . . . accountable will be severely restricted by none other than the United States Supreme Court.”
- At Re’s Judicata, Richard Re examines the “doctrine formerly known as ‘statutory standing’” in the context of last Term’s decision in Lexmark International v. Static Control Components.
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!
