Tuesday round-up
Court-related news and commentary focus on the tenure of Chief Justice John Roberts, who took his seat on the Court ten years ago today. In the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh looks back at the Chief Justice’s tenure thus far and concludes that he is taking “the long view,” while Richard Wolf of USA Today describes the Roberts Court as “[l]eaning right on guns but left on gays, right on race and religion but left on health care reform.” And Lisa Soronen of the State and Local Legal Center looks at the Roberts Court from the perspective of state and local governments.
With several death penalty cases on the Justices’ docket in October, the Court and capital punishment are also a hot topic. Elsewhere in the ABA Journal, Mark Walsh previews some of those capital cases and discusses the possibility that the Court will “peck away” at the death penalty, while in Slate Robert J. Smith draws parallels between the pope’s recent comments on “the need to curb our corrosive penal excess” and “themes emerging from the Supreme Court, particularly its recent cruel and unusual punishment jurisprudence.”
Briefly:
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro remembers Doug Kendall, president and founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center, who died last weekend at the age of fifty-one.
- In a guest post at the Election Law Blog, Josh Douglas remembers Rep. Bill Crawford, the petitioner in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, who died last week.
- At Bloomberg Politics, Greg Stohr reports on a recent poll which indicates that, although “Americans may be sharply divided on other issues, . . . they are united in their view of the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that unleashed a torrent of political spending: They hate it.”
- Jessica Gresko of the Associated Press reports that Rives Grogan, who was arrested for disrupting the April 28 arguments in the same-sex marriage cases, pleaded guilty in federal court last Friday.
- In an op-ed at Talking Points Memo, Richard Hasen argues that the “future composition of the Supreme Court is the most important civil rights cause of our time. It is more important than racial justice, marriage equality, voting rights, money in politics, abortion rights, gun rights, or managing climate change.”
- In the San Jose Mercury News, Howard Mintz discusses one of the cases on yesterday’s Long Conference: the city of San Jose’s “legal fight to revive the city’s flagging hopes to lure the Oakland A’s to Silicon Valley.”
- Justice Stephen Breyer will appear on San Francisco’s KQED today to discuss “life as a Supreme Court justice, his book ‘The Court and the World’ and whether legal decisions in other countries should influence those in the U.S.”
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.
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