Thursday round-up
on Aug 18, 2016 at 10:00 am
Briefly:
- In Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that the “late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have loved to take on the case of Armstrong v. Thompson, now before the court,” because – if review is granted – “it would be the first time in decades that the high court takes a fresh look at New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 decision that made it very difficult for public officials to successfully sue for libel or defamation.”
- In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse suggests that the Court’s recent decision striking down Texas’s abortion regulations (among others) reflects “a new willingness to call out legislatures for what they are really doing, not just what they say they are doing.”
- Denise Lavoie of the Associated Press (via Boston.com) reports that “James ‘Whitey’ Bulger has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal of his racketeering convictions for playing a role in 11 murders and committing a litany of other crimes.”
- In The Huffington Post, Jason Steed argues that “moving to confirm” Chief Judge Merrick Garland to fill the slot created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia “—now,before the election—is a high-profile, low-cost way for Republicans to distance themselves from Trump.”
- At his eponymous blog, Lyle Denniston reports that the Court “soon will be asked to clarify the duty of members of the military services to obey orders, even if they believe that doing so would violate their religious faith.”
- At Empirical SCOTUS, Adam Feldman “looks at five ‘sleeper cases’ from this past Term that have made their major impact through the lower courts.”
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