labor

Untold Story: How Scalia's Death Blew Up an Anti-union Group's Grand Legal Strategy

Michael Hiltzik Los Angeles Times
The implications of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death for the anti-union case known as Friedrichs are a bit uncertain. Some experts say the appellate ruling in favor of the union would be effectively affirmed by an evenly divided court. Others believe the court will ask for re-argument of the same case next term, presumably after it gets back up to full nine-member strength by the appointment and confirmation of successor to Scalia.

labor

Supreme Court OKs Longer Arguments in High-Stakes Union Case

Jess Bravin The Wall Street Journal
The court is considering whether to overrule its 1977 decision allowing states to require public employees to join a union or pay a fee to cover collective bargaining costs. A win for the plaintiffs—a group of California teachers who say they oppose union efforts to increase pay and protect job security—could cripple public sector unions in about two dozen states that have “agency fee” laws.

Racism, a Pool Party in Texas and the Supreme Court

Noliwe Rooks The Hill
The events in McKinney make a stronger argument than could almost any lawyer for why the court should affirm the importance of racially and economically integrated residential areas.

To Have and to Hold. Reproduction, Marriage, and the Constitution.

Jill Lepore The New Yorker
There is a lesson in the past fifty years of litigation. When the fight for equal rights for women narrowed to a fight for reproductive rights, defended on the ground of privacy, it weakened. But when the fight for gay rights became a fight for same-sex marriage, asserted on the ground of equality, it got stronger and stronger.

Supreme Court Right-Wingers Openly Hostile To Full Same-Sex Marriage Rights

Steven Rosenfeld Alternet
The reason that this case is so important is because it invites the Court to create a new legal landscape surrounding the constitutional rights to same-sex marriage—and protection from state laws that discriminate by treating same-sex couples unequally. Whatever the Court decides in its ruling expected this June will likely hold for many years—at least until the Court’s conservatives are replaced.

books

Court-Sanctioned Corruption and Plutocracy in America

Michael Hirsch The Indypendent
Successive High Court decisions have done more than enfranchise corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The same logic in the same cases now defines public corruption down: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo must be seen to operate. Absent that smoking gun, the financial elite has no limits on bankrolling campaigns whose candidates then vote their interests. To the nation's founders, that untrammeled influence was the essence of public corruption.

Theocracy Versus Democracy

William Greider The Nation
How the reckless Hobby Lobby decision has excited the imagination of the right wing.

The End of Obamacare?

Olga Khazan The Atlantic
Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in King v. Burwell, a case that threatens to yank the tax credit away from millions of people.If the Court goes for King, Obamacare as we know it might end. Most people who will be affected by this case do not realize they will be.
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