Friday round-up

By Amy Howe
on Sep 25, 2015 at 9:12 am

Pope Francis’s visit to the United States once again dominates Court-related news.  In the Legal Times (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that the pope “made an unscheduled visit Wednesday night to the Little Sisters of the Poor with the aim of showing support for the group’s battle against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate before the U.S. Supreme Court.”  And Amy Sullivan of Yahoo! News discusses the absence of three of the Court’s Catholic Justices – Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas – from the pope’s address to Congress yesterday.

At The Huffington Post, Cristian Farias discusses a recent speech by Justice Antonin Scalia at Rhodes College, suggesting that the speech “seemed to signal that his dismay over gay marriage continues.”  And Bloomberg BNA’s Kimberly Robinson talks to Roberta Kaplan, who represented Edie Windsor in her “historic U.S. Supreme Court win” striking “down the federal Defense of Marriage Act.”

The death penalty also factors into Court-related news and commentary today.  At Talking Points Memo, Caitlin Macneal reports on other recent remarks by Justice Scalia, who indicated that “he ‘wouldn’t be surprised’ if the court rules that it is unconstitutional” and “added that he believes that the Constitution allows for the death penalty as long as there is a fair trial.”  And in The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Charles Ogletree and David Harris urge the Court to grant review in a case involving whether “a juror’s racial bias violated the rights to an impartial jury and a fair trial of a man sentenced to death in Georgia.”

Briefly:

• The AARP previews the upcoming Term, with a focus on what’s at stake for Americans over the age of fifty.
• At PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman weighs in on a recent order by a federal district judge in Kentucky, who “declined to stay hisorder extending the injunction against Kim Davis to all eligible couples.”  Wasserman suggests that the judge may be “right about justice and fairness. But he is flat wrong on the procedure.”
• In another post at PrawfsBlawg, Wasserman discusses the later proceedings on remand in Tolan v. Cotton, in which the Court issued a summary reversal last year.

 If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, or op-ed relating to the Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com.