Thursday round-up

EDITH ROBERTS SEP 14, 2017 7:31 AM

At NPR, Nina Totenberg looks back at the life of Edith Windsor, “the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case that required the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages,” who became “an octogenarian rock star in the gay rights community.” Another look at Windsor’s life and her legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act comes from Lisa Keen at Keen News Service.

In an op-ed and an accompanying op-doc in The New York Times, David Feige urges the court to seize a “rare opportunity to correct a flawed doctrine that for the past two decades has relied on junk social science to justify punishing more than 800,000 Americans,” by reviewing two cases that “concern people on the sex offender registry and the kinds of government control that can constitutionally be imposed on them.” At ACS Blog, Bidish Sarma focuses on the cert petition in one of the cases, Karsjens v. Piper, a class action challenging Minnesota’s sex-offender civil commitment regime[‘s]” “profound and persistent failure to ensure that individuals who pose no danger to society actually get released.”

Briefly:

• At Keen News Service, Lisa Keen discusses the pending cert petition in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, in which “Lambda Legal … is asking the high court to rule that an existing federal law prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation”; she notes that “[i]f the court takes the case, the outcome –no matter what it is– would likely have profound implications for LGBT people in employment, education, housing, and other arenas.”
• In an op-ed for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse remembers the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, in which the court invalidated a Texas law authorizing local school districts to deny enrollment to undocumented children, noting that although the case “may be irrelevant in a strictly legal sense, there are strong reasons to … ponder it today,” and that “[t]he justices who worked out the majority opinion displayed a spirit of compromise and sense of common purpose that we see all too infrequently across our government institutions.”
• At Jost on Justice, Kenneth Jost observes that “the administration is set to open the Supreme Court’s new term next month … by siding with business interests and against organized labor in a case testing employees’ ability to join with other workers in contesting workplace policies that violate state or federal law,” “after revers[ing] the position previously taken by the Obama administration.”

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