Monday round-up
on Apr 20, 2015 at 6:10 am
Coverage and commentary continue to focus on the upcoming oral arguments in the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage. Writing for this blog, Lyle Denniston completed his series of posts previewing the oral arguments with a post on the amicus briefs supporting the states in the case. In the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Marcia Coyle reports that, “[f]rom the personal to the legal to the religious, opponents of same-sex marriage offer the U.S. Supreme Court a potpourri of arguments in support of their belief that the court should uphold state bans.” At The Daily Signal, Gene Schaerr contends that abortion and same-sex marriage “are closely linked in a short and simple causal chain that the Supreme Court would be wise not to set in motion.”
Briefly:
- In The National Law Journal, Tony Mauro reports on “a new federal Freedom of Information Act suit that was filed to obtain more details about” an “unusual statement” in 2011 by then-Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who “expressed regret for his predecessors’ use of racist language in decades-old U.S. Supreme Court briefs filed in Native American cases.”
- In another story for The National Law Journal, Mauro reports that this summer “four associates will leave the Bancroft law firm in Washington” to “”head to clerkships—three at the U.S. Supreme Court, and the fourth at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.”
- In Newsmax, George Will weighs in on Wednesday’s oral arguments in Horne v. Department of Agriculture, arguing that, although “[t]he Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is among the measures by which New Dealers tried and failed to regulate and mandate America back to prosperity,” “[s]eventy-eight years later, it is the government’s reason for stealing Marvin and Laura Horne’s raisins.”
- At the Maryland Appellate Blog, Steve Klepper discusses the “long wait” for a decision in Comptroller v. Wynne, in which the Court is considering “whether Maryland tax law, in denying a county income tax credit for income tax paid in other states on out-of-state income, discriminates against interstate commerce in violation of the so-called ‘dormant’ or ‘negative’ commerce clause.”
- At the Liberty Blog, Mark Miller discusses the petition for rehearing that the Pacific Legal Foundation filed in Kent Recycling LLC v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
- At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost argues that life tenure for Supreme Court Justices should come to an end, suggesting that a fixed term of eighteen years “would bring new blood onto the court at regular intervals. It would also give the political branches, the president and the Senate, a chance to recalibrate on a fixed schedule.”
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