So… the US Supreme Court got down the wire, as it always does during the last week of June, before it goes on its summer break. Looks like the case on marriage equality is about 100 pages (majority and dissent opinions). They sure know how to make things interesting…
Meanwhile, I really appreciated that NPR shared on Facebook a video of their own Nina Totenberg giving a less-than-two-minute overview of those 100ppgs, with the interesting remarks of the majority opinion by Justice Kennedy and the biting dissent. (NPR and its Facebook page).
PBS Newshour also has a nice breakdown of the case.
I also have to get around to reading the US Supreme Court decision that came out the other day on how disparate impact may now be considered as a basis for housing discrimination (see here for the NY Times coverage on it by Adam Liptak; here for the decision). I liked the dialog/analysis over at PBS NewsHour on the case. It’ll be curious to see how disparate impact might work in housing discrimination…
Considering how I had done a couple of housing discrimination cases, I like the idea of having some more tools in the arsenal that would be helpful and housing discrimination is tricky business without effective tools. Disparate impact would really approach it in a broader but targeted way (even if people feel uncomfortable about not looking for alleged intent, disparate impact really digs deeper into addressing social injustice by examining the effects).
Oh, and yeah, there’s that decision on the health care law (Liptak’s article in the NY Times here; the actual decision here).
Any lawyer can tell you that the constitutional cases aren’t short reads, but trying to get through them and make sense of them – well, not the simplest of reading, but it means something to me. Fortunately, e-readers make that a little easier – at least, I’d like to think so, but I barely got to really reading last year’s decisions after downloading them and as a news junkie, I’d like to try better and as a lawyer, at most, I end up reading the decisions most relevant to my area of work – but as a US S.Ct. curiosity seeker, well, there’s a weird fun to all of this, whether I like how a decision goes or not. (I’ve been a sucker to read Slate’s Supreme Court Breakfast Table feature every June the last couple of years).
And, while I’m not sure how the future will go, I’d like to think that the decisions this week were positive steps to a better and fairer society. Keep hope alive, everybody!
Oh, and otherwise: my current reading is Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, the first James Bond book. Probably not legal-related as I can get this week; I need a break…!
(cross-posted over at sswslitinmotion.tumblr.com).