Thursday round-up

AMY HOWE JUL 21, 2016 7:42 AM

Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its ruling in the challenge to Texas’s stringent voter ID law.  A divided en banc court struck down one key provision of the law and sent the case back to the lower court, decreasing the chances that the dispute will come immediately to the U.S. Supreme Court.  I covered the decision for this blog, with other coverage coming from Jon Herskovitz and Lawrence Hurley of Reuters and from Manny Fernandez and Erik Eckholm of The New York Times; commentary comes from Rick Hasen at his Election Law Blog. 

Commentary relating to the president’s nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia comes from Geoffrey McGovern, who at The Hill notes that he has “seen recent evidence that the Supreme Court no longer has the confidence of many Americans.”  In The Inquirer, Frederick Lawrence contends that the “categorical obstruction of the Garland nomination has created challenges for the court. But in the years to come, the institution whose credibility is most at risk from this obstruction is the U.S. Senate itself.” And in The New York Times, Jeff Rosen compares Garland to Justice Louis Brandeis, who previously held the record for the longest wait between nomination and confirmation.

Briefly:

• In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse argues that it is “time to break” the National Rifle Association’s “stranglehold on the vital process of confirming judges” – including Supreme Court Justices.
• Kimberly Robinson reports for Bloomberg Law that Senator Corey Booker has introduced a bill that would create an office to “monitor, file briefs in, and possibly argue on behalf of defendants in criminal cases at the” Court.
• At Guernica, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy looks at the relationship between the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence and the anti-abortion movement, arguing that “one of the reasons that the Supreme Court could rule so broadly in” the challenge to a Texas law regulating abortions “was the broad ruling in Citizens United. Call it legal Karma.”
• At the Washington Legal Foundation’s Legal Pulse, Richard Faulk considers the effect of the next Supreme Court appointment on administrative law and argues that, although“other issues may have more immediate appeal, few have more significant consequences for our liberty.”
• In The Cedar Mill News, Virginia Bruce looks at the possibility that the Court’s decisions in two property rights cases could be “spelling trouble nationwide for land use planning efforts.”
• At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman suggests that, even with a “liberal shift in the Court’s general demeanor,” “there are indications that the Court’s conservative bastion still remains strong.”

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.

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