JUSTICES CROSS IDEOLOGICAL LINES FOR PRIVACY | A Sotomayor Smackdown | Under Trump, Judiciary So White
November 30, 2017
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
|“In the political world, conservatives often accuse liberals of being soft on crime. At the U.S. court, that’s not how it goes. Case in point, at the high court on Wednesday, a majority of the justices across ideological lines indicated they may be willing to impose new limits on the government’s ability to gain access to large amounts of information retained by private companies in the digital age.” That’s Nina Totenberg with NPR reviewing yesterday’s arguments in the case of Carpenter v. United States — a case which will decide whether police need a search warrant to obtain cell phone tracking records.
SOTOMAYOR OUT SWINGING
|Damon Root with Reason Blog notes that in yesterday’s Carpenter arguments, JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR packed some punches when she “pummeled” the Trump administration lawyer who argued warrantless searches of cell phone records is constitutional. Sotomayor: “Most Americans, I still think, want to avoid Big Brother. They want to avoid the concept that government will be able to see and locate you anywhere you are at any point in time.”
WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DAHLIA LITHWICK
|The SCOTUS Queen of Slate, Dahlia Lithwick shares with us her whereabouts yesterday morning, tracking her own journey from Brooklyn, NY to the Carpenter arguments at 1 First Street in D.C. “I tell you all this because it is information about my location that I very much wish to share with you and I am now so doing,” she writes. But that wasn’t exactly the case for TIMOTHY CARPENTER who sits at the center of this case after investigators were able to obtain his cell phone tracking information without a warrant and sentence him to 116 years in prison.
PLAYING FOR THE SAME SIDE
|Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr reports that an upcoming clash over sports betting has put DONALD TRUMP and the NFL on the same team — all it took was New Jersey Governor CHRIS CHRISTIE and his SCOTUS bid to legalize sports gambling. Stohr notes, “It’s an unusual pairing in a case full of odd alignments and high stakes. New Jersey is seeking to overturn the 1992 federal law that bars single-game sports gambling in every state except Nevada. Should that effort succeed, other states could move quickly to grab part of the $150 billion the casino-backed American Gaming Association says is wagered illegally every year.”
TOP-ED
|In The Washington Post, George Will opines that the Supreme Court should allow states to set their own gambling laws and “defend federalism by telling the national government to stop telling state governments what laws they cannot change.”
JUDICIARY SO WHITE
|“As PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP moves aggressively to advance a legal agenda with racial dimensions, he is simultaneously setting records for the percentage of white people nominated for lifetime appointments to the federal courts.” CNN’s Joan Biskupic, Aaron Kessler and Ryan Struyk report the president’s picks for the judiciary lack the kind of drive for diversity we’ve previously seen ramp up in the last few decades.
OTHER NEWS
It's Too Easy For The Government To Invade Privacy In Name Of Security
The Hill“If successful, most citizens will not only be practically forced to carry around a government surveillance device but will literally pay for the privilege. Make no mistake. To paraphrase the AT&T slogan, the government is on the verge of ‘rethinking possible’ under the Fourth Amendment and could force the rest of us to rethink privacy in America.”
When 'Miss' Meant So Much More: How One Woman Fought Alabama — And Won
NPR“It wasn’t just about an honorific. It was about respect and racial equality. Her demand was an act of defiance that would eventually bring her name before the U.S. Supreme Court and set a precedent for how witnesses are addressed in courtrooms today — with equal courtesy.”