The Supreme Court of the United States of America:
It will consider three cases that could make it harder for workers and consumers to band together in class actions. And it will hear cases on the death penalty, a topic that twice led to unusually sharp and bitter exchanges on the bench last term, after Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. accused opponents of capital punishment of pursuing a “guerrilla war” against executions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded that supporters of the death penalty would be content to allow condemned inmates to be burned alive.
Given the contentious tenor of the last term, it looks like we can look forward to Supreme fireworks next year.
Players and issues and stuff below:
There's always Scalia, last term:
Dissenting from the decision establishing a right to same-sex marriage, Justice Scalia called Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion pretentious, egotistic and incoherent.
speaking of the pot.
Abood. Why the devil must we give a damn about Abood?
Well, there's Michael A. Carvin:
blunt-talking, rumpled and passionately libertarian. When he urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to dismantle President Obama’s health care law, Justice Sonia Sotomayor — an ardent liberal — could not get in a word.
Carvin lost in the case of ACA, but what about Abood? D. Louis ABOOD et al., Appellants, v. DETROIT BOARD OF EDUCATION et al.
Carvin is fixing for a rematch before SCOTUS with Abood:
Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209 (1977), is a US labor law case where the United States Supreme Court upheld the maintaining of a union shop in a public workplace. Public school teachers in Detroit had sought to overturn the requirement that they pay fees equivalent to union dues on the grounds that they opposed public sector collective bargaining and objected to the ideological activities of the union. The court affirmed that the union shop which is legal in the private sector is also legal in the public sector. They found that non-members may be assessed dues for "collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment purposes" while insisting that objectors to union membership or policy may not have their dues used for other ideological or political purposes.
For, alas, one must consider
The Subtle Signals of the Supreme Court:
Supreme Court justices like to say that they have no agenda. Cases come to them unbidden. They decide the ones that need deciding.
The reality is more complicated. The justices sometimes use their opinions to send messages about the kinds of cases they would like to hear....
The next term, which starts in October, will feature three cases brought at least partly in response to similar invitations.
One of them, a grave threat to public-sector unions, is a reaction to a 2012 majority opinion from Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. In making a minor adjustment to how public unions must issue notifications about their political spending, Justice Alito digressed to raise questions about the constitutionality of requiring workers who are not members of public unions to pay fees for the unions’ work on their behalf....
Michael A. Carvin, a leading conservative lawyer, also saw what was going on. He and the Center for Individual Rights, a libertarian group, promptly filed the challenge Justice Alito had sketched out. Indeed, Mr. Carvin asked the lower courts to rule against his clients, a Christian education group and 10 California teachers, so they could high-tail it to the Supreme Court.
Center for
Individual Rights? Rather, shouldn't it be the
Center for Corporate as Opposed to Individual Rights? CCOIR? Your general corporate mind fuckover?