Monday round-up
on Sep 29, 2014 at 9:07 am
Today the Justices will meet to consider petitions for certiorari for the first time since late June. Much of the coverage of the Court focuses on the cases that they are scheduled to consider today, including the seven petitions involving challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage. At CNN, Bill Mears summarizes the cases’ paths to the Court, while Tim Holbrook has an op-ed in which he encourages “the Justices [to] open the doors to marriage to all couples, regardless of their sex or gender.” In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Edwin Meese and Ryan Anderson take a different tack; they urge the Justices to “heed the reasoning” of courts that have upheld such bans. And at NBC News, Pete Williams has an interview with outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, who told him that, if review is granted, the federal government “will urge the Supreme Court to uphold state laws granting same-sex couples the right to marry.”
Other petitions before the Court include the case of Jennifer Dize, the widow of a Chesapeake Bay waterman and boat worker who died of a respiratory disease. As Jessica Gresko reports for the Associated Press, the issue in the case is whether the boat maintenance work that he did counts towards the minimum required to sue as a “seaman” under the Jones Act. And in USA Today, Richard Wolf has the story of the (now-settled) battle over the rights to superhero characters like Captain America and the Fantastic Four.
As Lyle has reported for this blog (here and here), Ohio has asked the Supreme Court to step into the controversy over its efforts to reduce early voting opportunities, after two lower courts have blocked those plans. In commentary at Election Law at Moritz, Edward Foley analyzes the arguments made by the plaintiffs in their response.
Briefly:
- At Talking Points Memo, Sahil Kapur covers comments by an attorney representing the challengers to the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchange subsidies, who predicted that, “if the case reaches the Supreme Court, . . . all five Republican-appointed justices [will ]rule that the federal exchange subsidies are invalid.”
- In The Atlantic, Garrett Epps looks back at last Term and what it might say about the Roberts Court, including what he describes as “[t]he court’s evolving idea of the role of “the majority” under the Constitution. Does the majority have constitutional rights? And if so, who is the majority anyway?”
- At his Election Law Blog, Richard Hasen discusses the next steps, at the Supreme Court, for a challenge to Wisconsin’s voter identification law in the wake of the Seventh Circuit’s denial of rehearing en banc.
- At Federal Regulations Advisor, Leland Beck previews the Court’s merits docket from a regulatory perspective, focusing on the “implications that affect many agencies and regulated parties in ways that may not be found in the briefs or decision of the specific cases.”
[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., represents the petitioners in Kirby v. Marvel Enterprises.]
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