Hendrick Hertzberg on the late Anthony Lewis:

Tony Lewis knew more about the Constitution and the laws, their history and meaning, than the vast majority of Supreme Court Justices, let alone lawyers. In 1956, James Reston, the Times’s legendary Washington bureau chief, had sent Lewis back to Cambridge for a year’s study at Harvard Law School on a Nieman fellowship. He learned well. Justice Felix Frankfurter would tell Reston that “there are not two Justices of this Court who have such a grasp of these cases.” And Lewis, unlike all but a few Justices, could write. He was occasionally cited in the Court’s opinions, but think of the ones he might have written himself!

We paid tribute to Lewis, covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times in the 1950s and ’60s, on the show today by listening back to an interview Terry did with him in 1991. He died yesterday.

Image of the Supreme Court by aabernathy

“It used to be that what it meant to be a conservative on the Supreme Court was respect for precedent and slow-moving change. What’s so different about the Roberts’ Court is the way they are burning through many of the precedents they don’t like.”

- Jeffrey Toobin on Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court

lookhigh:

The Supreme Court, under construction

On Monday’s Fresh Air, Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, provides a roundup of the past year’s most important Supreme Court decisions — including ones addressing healthcare reform, immigration law, campaign finance rules, the access of Guantanamo detainees to the courts, and the rights of criminal defendants while plea bargaining.

I do think John Roberts takes himself very seriously and he should, as the custodian of the prestige and legitimacy of the branch of government that he heads. How much that entered his calculations in [the healthcare case], only he knows. But it’s a perfectly appropriate consideration to make sure your branch, which is meant to be disinterested and apolitical and judicial, should not be perceived as yet a third political branch of government. And in the wake of ideological 5-4 decisions like Bush v. Gore and Citizens United, the Court has let itself open to that interpretation and had it struck down the healthcare law 5-4 along ideological lines, there would have been some substantial attack on the credibility of the Court.

— Adam Liptak on Chief Justice Robert’s legacy

NPR Live Blog: Supreme Court Upholds Health Care Law

(via Supreme Court Upholds Health Care Law : The Two-Way : NPR)

Three months after historic arguments before the high court over the constitutionality of the administration’s sweeping health care law, we are about to find out if it will hold up. [full NPR coverage here]

(via Judging The Health Care Law : NPR)

That’s the one tax deduction that judges have, if I can remember. If you buy new robes, that’s a business expense and can be deducted.

— Justice Stevens on his robes. (Previously: Justice Breyer on Wait Wait, on his robes)

There’s been some change in my views about the death penalty, but I think there’s more of a change in the jurisprudence of the Court that made me eventually reach the conclusion that the death penalty, as it is presently administered, is unconstitutional.

— Justice John Paul Stevens voted to uphold the death penalty in 1976. On today’s Fresh Air, he discusses his evolving viewpoints over his 35 years on the Supreme Court. 

The Court has held, I think incorrectly, that the First Amendment protects the right to use money just as though money were speech.

— On today’s Fresh Air, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens talks about his dissenting opinion in the Citizens United ruling.

harleenlikes:

The sky was blue, and everything was perfect.

Tomorrow: retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens

In the 1860’s it was the Republican Party in Washington - the home of former abolitionists – that sought to grant legal rights and social equality to blacks in the South. The Democrats of the day had broad support among white Southerners and conservatives in the North.

The Republicans, then dubbed radical Republicans, managed to enact a series of constitutional amendments and reconstruction acts granting legal equality to former slaves, giving them access to federal courts if their rights were violated. But Lawrence Goldstone says that in a series of cowardly rulings, the Supreme Court undermined those laws, and laid the basis for years of lynchings and Jim Crow rules in the South.

Tomorrow: the role of the Supreme Court in suppressing civil rights. We talk to Lawrence Goldstone. His book, Inherently Unequal, takes a look at the push for equality for black Americans — and the push back — both during and after Abraham Lincoln’s presidency.

U.S. Supreme Court building, Washington, D.C. (LOC) (by The Library of Congress)

I knew it was a confusing decision because my phone started ringing and lawyers for both sides were completely convinced that they had won the case. … the court’s decision was ambiguous enough that you couldn’t even tell which side had won.

— New York Times reporter Adam Liptak on the ambiguous and vague decision handed down by the Supreme Court in March 2010 on mutual-fund advisers’ fees. The decision was unanimous but vague enough that both sides declared victory.

New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak on the conservative nature of John Roberts’ Court: “The Burger court and the Rehnquist court, which sat for about 35 years, fairly consistently were ruling in a conservative direction about 55 percent of the time. That was a very, very sharp turn to the right from the Warren court, the famously liberal court that preceded it, which was at 34 percent [conservative]. And the Roberts court, which has now finished five years, now moves an additional increment to the right. It’s now at 58 percent — I stress, not a huge move, but a discernable move in a period where there was nothing like this. And the term that ended last year, the court is at 65 percent conservative. So you do see by these measurements, the court is noticeably more conservative than even the conservative courts that preceded it.”

Tomorrow: We talk about the Roberts court with New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak. He’s recently written about how the Roberts court has become the most conservative one in living memory, and that several of the court’s written decisions have been unusually long, but lacking in clarity.