Did you miss your Supreme Court news this week? Let our Weekly Roundup help. (To stay on top of the latest Supreme Court happenings, follow ISCOTUS on Twitter.)
On Monday, the Justices opened a new term at the Supreme Court. In USA Today, Richard Wolf wrote that the new Term “truly is deja vu all over again.” Robert Barnes said that the new Term’s “docket . . . seems designed to remind Americans about the importance of the high court in the presidential contest” in the Washington Post.
On FiveThirtyEight, Oliver Roeder draws on empirical studies of ideological “drift” on the Supreme Court to argue that Justices tend to become more liberal as they get older.
At the New Yorker, Lincoln Caplan discusses last term’s death penalty decision as a possible turning point in a movement that could end with the Court abolishing the death penalty.
The first death penalty of the new term involved a case “so shocking it has its own Wikipedia entry”: The Wichita Massacre. According to Robert Barnes, “the Supreme Court spent two hours Wednesday not very successfully trying to separate the brutality of the murder rampage carried out by brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr in 2000 from the somewhat antiseptic legal issues that caused the Kansas Supreme Court to overturn their death sentences.”
In OBB Personenverkehr v. Sachs on Monday, the Court considered whether or not an Austrian national railroad is entitled to sovereign immunity from a lawsuit by a woman injured in a railroad accident in Austria. Noah Feldman suggested the Court is hearing the case “to try to keep control of how U.S. laws implicate foreign sovereigns.” On Lawfare, Ingrid Wuerth analyzed the proceedings and said the Justices “seemed strongly inclined to hold for OBB and reverse, but they proffered several potential reasons for doing so.”
Time Magazine polled experts about the best Supreme Court decisions since 1960. Winners include Loving v. Virginia and New York Times v. Sullivan.
This week the Court released audio of opinion announcements from last term. Go to Oyez and listen to the contentious announcements in the same-sex marriage case, the Affordable Care Act case, the death penalty case, and more.