Thursday round-up
on Nov 19, 2015 at 6:20 am
In the Harvard Law Review’s online forum, Laurence Tribe responds to Kenji Yoshino’s Comment on Obergefell v. Hodges (which Amanda Frost discussed in an academic highlight for this blog), arguing that the decision’s “chief jurisprudential achievement is to have tightly wound the double helix of Due Process and Equal Protection into a doctrine of equal dignity—and to have located that doctrine in a tradition of constitutional interpretation as an exercise in public education.” Adam Liptak of The New York Times reports on Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent appearance at Georgetown University Law Center, where Scalia told first-year students that the Court’s “decisions protecting gay rights were not rooted in the Constitution, and their logic could as easily apply to child molesters.”
Six days after Friday’s announcement that the Court will review a challenge to a Texas law imposing additional regulations on abortion clinics in that state, coverage of and commentary on Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole continues. Lawrence Hurley of Reuters reports on a new poll indicating that “Americans are split over abortion restrictions like those in a Texas law challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court, reflecting deep and longstanding divisions over the contentious issue.” And at the Bill of Health Blog, Gregory Lipper argues that restrictions on abortion “often push women to obtain abortion by other means that are far more dangerous” – consequences that, he argues, “are what led one conservative Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, to support abortion rights.”
Briefly:
- NPR’s Nina Totenberg covers Monday’s filing by attorneys “for a lesbian mother in Alabama,” who “are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a decision by Alabama’s highest court refusing to recognize her parental rights under an adoption granted in Georgia.” (Lyle Denniston covered the filing earlier this week for this blog.)
- At Verdict, Michael Dorf discusses campus unrest and Abigail Fisher’s challenge to the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions process, concluding that “it would be a tragic mistake to regard the campus protests as a reason to abandon the goals that the Supreme Court endorsed in Grutter and, twenty-five years before that, in Bakke.”
- This week Justice Sonia Sotomayor visited the University of Richmond Law School, where she spoke for an hour with Dean Wendy Perdue. Video of her appearance is available on the law school’s website.
- The Citizen’s Guide to the Supreme Court has a podcast on Montgomery v. Louisiana, in which the Court is considering whether its 2012 decision prohibiting mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of murder applies retroactively.
- In a webcast at the Knowledge Center, Lisa Soronen and Paul Clement discuss the workings of the Supreme Court and the lower courts.
- In The New Republic, Simon Lazarus discusses (and criticizes) what he describes as a “stealth corporate takeover” of the Court.
- Maurice Chammah interviews Michael Meltsner for The Marshall Project, discussing the debate over whether to bring a challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty to the Court sooner or later.
If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) news 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.
