Tuesday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Jul 14, 2015 at 8:27 am

Scalia/Ginsburg, an opera inspired by the differences between the two Justices and friends, made its debut last weekend at the Castleton Festival in Virginia.  NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports on the opera, while Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal covers Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s reaction.

The execution of Missouri death row inmate David Zink – the first execution since the Court’s decision in Glossip v. Gross, upholding Oklahoma’s use of midazolam as the first drug in its lethal injection protocol – is scheduled for this evening.  In one post at casetext, Josh Lee argues that the scheduled execution “places us at a crossroads—what the Supreme Court does now, in light of the signals it sent in Glossip, will portend something important for us as a society.”  And in another post, Vicki Werneke discusses what the Court’s decision on same-sex marriage might mean for the death penalty. 

Briefly:

• Laurence Tribe recently delivered the Robert H. Jackson Lecture (video) at the Chautauqua Institution, discussing (among other things) the Court’s decisions in King v. Burwell and Obergefell v. Hodges.
• At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser discusses (and criticizes) a column by George Will that “calls upon the next Republican elected to the White House to ask their potential judicial nominees whether they agree that the Court’s 1905 decision inLochner v. New York ‘correctly reflected the U.S. natural rights tradition and the Ninth and 14th amendments’ affirmation of unenumerated rights.’”
• In an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle (subscription or registration required), Bob Egelko compares Justice Clarence Thomas’s comments in his concurring opinion in the Court’s recent decision in Davis v. Ayala with Thomas’s remarks during his 1991 confirmation hearing.

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