Thursday round-up
on Jul 23, 2015 at 9:26 am
Briefly:
- In her column for The New York Times, Linda Greenhouse discusses the challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate by religious non-profits and the possibility that the groups’ “argument goes too far, even for the Roberts court.”
- In the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Tony Mauro reports that the “recent release of the annual financial disclosure forms submitted by U.S. Supreme Court justices has renewed the debate over when justices should recuse in pending cases and how they should avoid conflicts of interest.”
- In The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Marcia Coyle reports that the Court’s “recent decisions on same-sex marriage and health care served as the catalysts for” Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s “Senate hearing Wednesday on retention elections, term limits and other means to rein in what he labeled the justices’ ‘lawlessness.’”
- In the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Coyle reports that “[l]egal challenges to solitary-confinement policies are working their way through the federal courts to the U.S. Supreme Court faster than one justice in particular may have anticipated.”
- In another story for the Supreme Court Brief (subscription required), Coyle reports that awards of attorney’s fees in patent cases have increased in the wake of the Court’s 2014 decision in Octane Fitness v. Icon Health & Fitness.
- In USA Today, Richard Wolf reports on the legal battles – often involving religious objections to same-sex marriage by providers of wedding services – that are brewing in the wake of the Court’s same-sex marriage decision.
- In an op-ed for The Week, Scott Lemieux criticizes comments by Michael Cannon, one of the architects of the challenge to the availability of tax subsidies under the ACA; he contends that the fact that the challenge “was based on an almost comically transparent historical sham surely helps to explain why Roberts rejected the argument of the plaintiffs so forcefully.”
- In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Lee Rowland argues that, “when the Supreme Court had its chance to weigh in on the Confederate flag debate — and protect the First Amendment rights of Texans who wanted to display it on their cars’ license plates — the Court got it wrong.”
A friendly reminder: We rely on our readers to send us links for the 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.
