Thursday round-up
on Jun 4, 2015 at 9:56 am
Coverage of and commentary on Monday’s opinions continue. Writing for the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that the Court’s ruling in Elonis v. United States, involving the prosecution of threats made on Facebook, “turned out to be one of those narrow decisions that Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. has touted as the way to achieve greater unanimity.” Commentary comes from Jonathan Keim, who at the National Review Online argues that the case “is more important for what it leaves open than what it resolves.”
Other commentary focuses on Monday’s summary reversal in Taylor v. Barkes, holding that Delaware prison officials are entitled to qualified immunity from a lawsuit filed by the family of an inmate who committed suicide. Lisa Soronen weighs in at the Appellate Practice Blog of the International Municipal Lawyers Association, while at Verdict Michael Dorf uses the decision to illustrate and criticize the breadth of qualified immunity protection under the Court’s precedent.
Briefly:
- At The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, Jacob Gershman reports on a paper by the Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen, who “quantifies the ‘celebrity justice trend.’”
- Katie Couric of Yahoo! News (video) interviews Jim Obergefell, the name plaintiff in the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage and the recognition thereof.
- In the Legal Times (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that “[d]escendants of the late legendary athlete Jim Thorpe on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let them re-bury his remains on Indian land in his native Oklahoma.”
- And in the Supreme Court Brief (registration required), Mauro notes that “a drama now showing in theaters nationwide features a high court case, including a rare if fanciful portrayal of an oral argument.”
- At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie weighs in on Monday’s decision in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch, reversing the Tenth Circuit’s ruling that the retailer could not be held liable for failing to hire a Muslim teenager who wears a headscarf when the woman had failed to notify the company that she would need accommodations.
[Disclosure: John Elwood, a frequent contributor to this blog, is among the counsel to Anthony Elonis. However, I am not involved in the case in any way.]
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