Wednesday round-up

AMY HOWE OCT 15, 2014 5:55 AM

Yesterday morning the Court heard oral arguments in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission, in which the Justices are considering whether a state dentistry board can prohibit non-dentists from selling teeth –whitening services.  Nina Totenberg covers the argument for NPR, while Daniel Fisher of Forbes concludes that the Justices “seemed left in a quandary about how to deal with a clear example of self-interested professionals trying to keep prices high in a lucrative business by excluding competition.”

The Court also heard oral arguments in the water-rights dispute between Kansas, on one side, and Nebraska and Colorado on the other.  Jeremy Jacobs covers the proceedings for Greenwire, while Kimberly Bennett does the same (for both cases) at JURIST.  And at ISCOTUSnow, Edward Lee predicts the winners of both of Tuesday’s oral arguments based on the number of questions for each side.

Before the oral arguments, the Court issued orders from its October 10 Conference.  Lyle Denniston covers the orders for this blog, with a focus on the Court’s announcement that it will not review the case of three men challenging their sentences for selling drugs on the ground that those sentences were based in part on drug quantities alleged in counts on which they had been acquitted.  Kent Scheidegger also discusses the case at Crime and Consequences.

Briefly:

• Writing for this blog, Lyle Denniston reports that, “[o]ver the dissents of three Justices, the Supreme Court [yesterday] barred Texasfrom enforcing two parts of its new abortion-restriction law — one part as it applied throughout the state, the other as it applied to two clinics in the southwest part of the state.”
• At The Awl, Ryan Rodenberg recounts his visit to the Court last winter, including his “fleeting intellectual connection” with Justice Stephen Breyer.
• At Crime and Consequences, Kent Scheidegger weighs in on “a study that purports to show that Supreme Court Justices are more likely to vote for protection of a speaker in First Amendment cases if they are ideologically aligned with that speaker.”
• And in another post at Crime and Consequences, Scheidegger discusses comments by Erwin Chemerinsky in an interview regarding his new book on the Court.
• Arise America (video) covers the Court’s announcement that it will not review any of the seven petitions arising out of challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage.
• At his Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen discusses the challenge to Texas’s voter identification law and whether the federal government and the private plaintiffs could or should ask the Supreme Court to step in.

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