Friday round-up
on Jun 10, 2016 at 6:59 am
Yesterday the Court issued three decisions in argued cases. Writing for this blog, Richard Re covered the ruling in favor of death-row inmate Terrance Williams, in which the Court “created a new, albeit narrow, constitutional recusal rule: a judge who has had ‘significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision regarding the defendant’s case’ must recuse.” Other coverage comes from NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Tony Mauro at Law.com (subscription or registration required), Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST, Richard Wolf of USA Today, and Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones. Commentary on the decision comes from Ruthann Robson at Constitutional Law Prof Blog.
Coverage of yesterday’s ruling in Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, in which the Court held that the Double Jeopardy Clause prohibits Puerto Rico and the United States from successively prosecuting a single person for the same conduct under equivalent criminal laws, comes from Lyle Denniston for this blog; other coverage comes from Jaclyn Belczyk for JURIST.
Coverage related to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to succeed him, and Supreme Court nominations generally comes from Patrick Gregory of U.S. Law Week. Gregory reports on a keynote speech by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who predicted that three “dissents by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will one day be the law of the land.” Commentary comes from Elizabeth Wydra, who in The Huffington Post, argues that as “long as Republican Senators insist on holding a vacant seat open on the Supreme Court for no reason other than pure politics, they are threatening real harm to our system of justice.” The editorial board of The New York Times weighs in as well, arguing that although the Senate Republicans’ “blockade of Judge Garland is shameful,” “it is only the most glaring example of what has been a historic slowdown in filling federal court vacancies across the country.”
Briefly:
- David Savage of the Los Angeles Times reports on the petition for review filed by a group of American Samoans, who are asking the Court “to correct a historic wrong and overturn a century-old law that denies them the right to be U.S. citizens at birth.”
- At Truthdig, Rose Aguilar interviews Stephanie Toti, the lead counsel for the petitioners in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the challenge to Texas’s abortion regulations, about the stakes in that case.
Remember, we rely exclusively on our readers to send us links for our round-up. 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.
