Monday round-up
on May 11, 2015 at 8:38 am
Perhaps the biggest Court-related news at the end of last week was that actress Natalie Portman will play Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a movie about Ginsburg’s career as an advocate for women’s rights. Coverage comes from Lily Karlin and Sam Levine in The Huffington Post, from Andrea Towers for Entertainment Weekly, and from Deadline Hollywood.
Coverage of and commentary on the April 29 argument in Glossip v. Gross, the challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, continue. In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro interviews Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center about the arguments, while at PrawfsBlawg Jonathan Simon criticizes comments by Justice Samuel Alito suggesting that there is a “guerrilla war” against the death penalty. And in The Washington Post, Robert Smith and Charles Ogletree weigh in, suggesting that, although the “political circumstances prompting Oklahoma’s use of midazolam may personally trouble Alito and Scalia, in the end they have no bearing on the only question before the court: Will the justices tolerate the risk of pain and suffering that experimenting with midazolam presents?”
Commentary on the oral arguments in the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage and their possible implications also continues. At ACSblog, John Paul Schnapper-Casteras argues that, as “the justices grapple with how to resolve the question of same-sex marriage and write the majority opinion, they would be well-served by going back to the future and relying upon” the Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down that state’s ban on interracial marriage, “as central authority.” In another post at ACSblog, Camilla Taylor contends that, although a victory at the Court “would be historic, it would not be the end, even for our marriage work.” At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost argues that “religious liberty has become the last refuge of those who oppose marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples,” and he predicts that we can “expect more such liberty-wrapped initiatives if the Supreme Court recognizes marriage rights for same-sex couples in June.”
Briefly:
- At Bloomberg Politics, Sahil Kapur reports that, during a South Carolina barbecue stop, potential presidential candidate Rick Perry used the pending same-sex marriage cases as an example “to sound the alarm about a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton appointing as many as four justices to the Supreme Court.”
- At Federal Regulations Advisor, Leland Beck discusses last week’s grant in a pair of cases involving the authority of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
- In The Atlantic, Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres contend that the Court’s recent decision in Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar, upholding a Florida rule that prohibits candidates for judgeships from personally soliciting campaign contributions, “offers Congress a roadmap for cleaning up campaign finance. If Congress embraces Roberts’s support for a ban on judges personally soliciting campaign contributions, and applies it to its own members, it can bring ‘dialing for dollars’ to a decisive end.”
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