Friday round-up
Coverage relating to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to succeed him comes from Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post, who reports that a Utah newspaper mistakenly published Sen. Orrin Hatch’s op-ed on his meeting with Garland before the meeting took place. Commentary comes from a podcast at Advice and Consent and from Ed Kilgore, who in New York suggests that Donald Trump’s release of a list of potential nominees “might allow conservatives paranoid about past SCOTUS ‘betrayals’ by Republican presidents and/or anxious to push their particular candidates and constitutional theories to insist on other candidates — and presidents — in the future.”
Briefly:
- In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse discusses last week’s opinion in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, suggesting that the Court “is engaged in an exercise of understandable but fruitless wishful thinking.”
- In The Huffington Post, Cristian Farias reports on a recent ruling by a federal judge in Rhode Island, relying on the Court’s decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, in a lawsuit involving a city’s redistricting maps and a state prison.
- CT criminal law weighs in Monday’s decision in Foster v. Chatman, complaining that although the ruling “points out all that is wrong with racial bias and tells us that it is unacceptable, it does nothing to provide any guidance how.”
- Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones discusses a recent study that quantifies interruptions of the Justices and notes that the Court’s male Justices “spent a lot of time interrupting the two youngest female justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.”
- At Al.com, Kent Faulk reports on a new Alabama law, passed in the wake of the Court’s decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana, that requires defendants sentenced to life in prison to “at least serve 30 years before they can first be considered for parole.”
- At Vox, Victoria Massie looks at Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and affirmative action, focusing on how white women have benefited from the practice but also have “become some of affirmative action’s most ardent opponents.”
- In the Hofstra Labor and Employment Journal, Robert and Jeffrey Douglas look back at the Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., focusing on what they contend is the Court’s misinterpretation of the fable on which the opinion relied.
- A symposium in the Vanderbilt Law Review discusses the role of the Court in the twenty-first century.
[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the respondents in Zubik. However, I am not affiliated with the firm.]
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