Jost on Cameras in the Courtroom
Ken Jost, the Supreme Court editor at CQ Press, has put together a lengthy and comprehensive analysis on all things “Cameras in the Court” in a new report for CQ Researcher. I’ve seen a copy–which includes a sidebar interview with me among its 20-plus pages–and the report really achieves the impossible by making the otherwise well-trod topic quite interesting by exploring its unnoticed nuances and taken-for-granted history. An excerpt introducing the report is available at CQ Researcher’s blog:
[E]xcept for the working press, members of the Supreme Court bar and invited guests, all visitors to the Supreme Court face a time-consuming process in trying to see the justices in action. Would-be spectators typically line up hours in advance to claim one of the 250 seats available for the general public. At least 50 spectators are allowed to stay for an entire, hour-long argument, but others are ushered in for only a few minutes.
Camera-access advocates have been making their case over the past decade in large part by emphasizing the public’s limited access to the courtroom. “There is no reason why in the 21st century the American people should not be able to watch their democracy in action, and the Supreme Court should not be an exception,” says Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice. The alliance was part of a 46-group coalition led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that urged the lame-duck Congress last year to pass legislation either requiring or calling on the Supreme Court to permit live TV coverage.
The pressure from Congress and outside groups has helped prompt the court to make audio recordings of arguments available sooner and more widely than in the past. But the justices have not allowed camera coverage of proceedings, whether live or delayed.
The three justices vocally opposed to cameras — Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas — warn that TV coverage could hurt collegiality on the court and endanger the justices’ personal security. Scalia has also complained that TV coverage would reduce the Supreme Court to “entertainment.”
This excerpt, however, hardly does justice to the breadth and depth of the full report, which you can purchase in print or electronic format at CQ Press.
Scalia Returns to Form, Thomas Sucker Punches Scalia’s Prodigality
Today’s unanimous decision in NASA v. Nelson–see here for my oral argument recap from October–held that the government has the power to conduct full background checks despite the argument by employees of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab that parts of those checks violate their right to “informational privacy.”
Writing for six members of the Court, Justice Alito refused to address whether such a right actually exists, and instead assumed its existence for the sake of rejecting its application to the JPL employees’ claims. Justices Scalia and Thomas, however, refused to go along with this compromise resolution. Instead, Scalia, in a separate concurrence joined by Thomas, returned to form with a bruising critique of the Court’s “substantive due process” jurisprudence–the very jurisprudence he adopted to extend the Second Amendment to the states in last year’s oral argument and plurality opinion for McDonald v. City of Chicago.
Nevertheless, Justice Thomas wouldn’t let Scalia return to the fold without reminding Scalia of his last year’s prodigality from their bedrock principles. I’ll let Josh Blackman take it from here:
Scalia’s opinion returns to his usual antagonism towards substantive due process. Not even a single citation to McDonald. No attempt to reconcile his aberrant opinion in the famed gun case. I suppose that McDonald will be the new Gonzales v. Raich, and we should “just get over it.” (that is Scalia’s common refrain when people ask him to reconcile Raich). As recently as last week, Scalia joined a Thomas dissent from denial of cert, other than a footnote that relied on Raich. As I have written at great length, Scalia’s opinion cannot be explained here. His position is at odds with two decades of jurisprudence, and he makes no effort to explain it. While Thomas cites to McDonald, Scalia ignores it. Scalia’s acquiescence to substantive due process in McDonald cannot be reconciled with his animosity towards that “plastic” standard.
Justice Thomas wrote his own curt one paragraph concurring opinion in judgment.
“I agree with JUSTICE SCALIA that the Constitution does not protect a right to informational privacy. Ante, at 1 (opinion concurring in judgment). No provision in the Constitution mentions such a right. Cf. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 605–606 (2003) (THOMAS, J., dissent-ing) (“I can find neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a general right of privacy . . .” (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted)). And the notion that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment is a wellspring ofunenumerated rights against the Federal Government “strains credulity foreven the most casual user of words.” McDonald v. Chi-cago, 561 U. S. ___, ___ (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring inpart and concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7).”
What does Thomas’ concurring opinion add? Thomas focuses on the fact that the due process clause does not protect unenumerated rights, suggesting that it can protect enumerated rights. Perhaps he is trying to provide cover to Scalia, who joined McDonald’s due process opinion. As I have theorized before, because the Second Amendment is actually enumerated, Scalia may find this approach palatable. I find this distinction unpersuasive. As I have argued before, whether the right is enumerated, or unenumerated, the Court still needs to rely on some nebulous notion of liberty. Thomas may be trying to explain Scalia’s opinion, where Scalia would not do so specifically. In my mind, its not effective. Regardless, not even Thomas would accede to relying on the due process clause to protect an enumerated right. To quote my good friend Mike Sacks, this concurring opinion can best be characterized as a “sucker punch.” Ouch.
The standoff continues.
Is the End Near for Affirmative Action?
The Fifth Circuit has just handed down its opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas upholding UT-Austin’s race-conscious admissions for those not among the auto-admitted top ten percent of their high school classes. I flagged this case some months ago and have been eagerly awaiting its result. In August, I devoted an entire post to the prospect of the Roberts Court granting certiorari to Fisher‘s inevitable petition and, in turn, reversing precedent to rule higher education affirmative action unconstitutional.
Senior Judge Patrick Higginbotham‘s opinion depends entirely on the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for herself and the Court’s liberal bloc, reaffirmed the constitutionality of affirmative action in higher education. While Justice Samuel Alito has not faced a higher-ed affirmative action case since arriving on the Court, his vote in 2007’s Parents Involved and his generally conservative voting pattern overall strongly suggest that he will not vote in accord with his predecessor’s opinion in Grutter.
The Fisher decision notably includes Judge Emilio M. Garza‘s 30 page anti-Grutter broadside, more politely labeled as a “special concurrence.” Judge Garza, a Reagan appointee to the district court, a George H.W. Bush appointee to the Fifth Circuit, and a runner-up to Justice Clarence Thomas for Justice Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court in 1991, apparently wrote his special concurrence specifically for the consumption of the current Court’s conservative bloc–including Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in Grutter and concurred in Parents Involved.
Garza’s concurrence in Fisher begins:
Whenever a serious piece of judicial writing strays from fundamental principles of constitutional law, there is usually a portion of such writing where those principles are articulated, but not followed. So it goes in Grutter, where a majority of the Court acknowledged strict scrutiny as the appropriate level of review for race-based preferences in university admissions, but applied a level of scrutiny markedly less demanding. To be specific, race now matters in university admissions, where, if strict judicial scrutiny were properly applied, it should not.
Today, we follow Grutter’s lead in finding that the University of Texas’s race-conscious admissions program satisfies the Court’s unique application ofstrict scrutiny in the university admissions context. I concur in the majority opinion, because, despite my belief that Grutter represents a digression in the course of constitutional law, today’s opinion is a faithful, if unfortunate, application of that misstep. The Supreme Court has chosen this erroneous path and only the Court can rectify the error. In the meantime, I write separately to underscore this detour from constitutional first principles.
Justice Kennedy spoke to this very “misstep” in his Grutter dissent, arguing not that affirmative action is unconstitutional, but rather that the majority unlawfully loosened its own strict scrutiny standard for such race-conscious admissions programs. Kennedy’s pivotal position is not lost on Garza, as evidenced in his explicit invocation of the justice:
After finding that racial diversity at the University of Michigan Law School (“Law School”) was a compelling governmental interest, the Court redefined the meaning of narrow tailoring. See Grutter, 539 U.S. at 387 (Kennedy, J., dissenting) (“The Court, however, does not apply strict scrutiny. By trying to say otherwise, it undermines both the test and its own controlling precedents.”); see generally Ian Ayres & Sydney Foster, Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask: Narrow Tailoring After Grutter and Gratz, 85 TEX. L. REV. 517 (2007). The Court replaced narrow tailoring’s conventional “least restrictive means” requirement with a regime that encourages opacity and is incapable of meaningful judicial review under any level of scrutiny.
Ultimately, Garza cites Kennedy five times despite Garza’s own more hardline opposition to affirmative action, which he spells out in conclusion:
My disagreement with Grutter is more fundamental, however. Grutter’s failing, in my view, is not only that it approved an affirmative action plan incapable of strict scrutiny, but more importantly, that it approved the use of race in university admissions as a compelling state interest at all. […]
Yesterday’s racial discrimination was based on racial preference; today’s racial preference results in racial discrimination. Changing the color of the group discriminated against simply inverts, but does address, the fundamental problem: the Constitution prohibits all forms of government-sponsored racial discrimination. Grutter puts the Supreme Court’s imprimatur on such ruinous behavior and ensures that race will continue to be a divisive facet of American life for at least the next two generations. Like the plaintiffs and countless other college applicants denied admission based, in part, on government-sponsored racial discrimination, I await the Court’s return to constitutional first principles.
In so writing, Garza, who could have been the Court’s first Hispanic justice, makes sure to appeal not only to Justice Kennedy, but also to Justices Scalia and Thomas, the latter of whom has been a vocal opponent of affirmative action on and off the bench. Neither Chief Justice Roberts nor Justice Alito have yet voiced their opinions on higher education affirmative action from their perches on the Supreme Court, but Roberts’s concluding aphorism in Parents Involved, which was joined by Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, is instructive towards those seeking to divine the two George W. Bush appointees’ votes in Fisher.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice Roberts famously wrote in Parents Involved. Justice Kennedy agreed to disagree with the statement’s simple certitude, filing his own concurrence in the judgment that put forward his more accepting–but still quite restrictive–take on race-conscious government measures. As such, Judge Garza was smart in addressing the Court’s entire conservative bloc in his special concurrence: either way, Grutter‘s days are numbered. Just as Citizens United reversed McConnell v. FEC and Gonzales v. Carhart all but wiped out Stenberg v. Carhart, Fisher will find the Roberts Court once again doing away with an O’Connor-backed, 5-4 precedent by the new 5-4 reality.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: next term is going to be a doozy.
This piece is cross-posted at The CockleBur.
Kagan’s First Opinion; Scalia cites Foreign Law
Just a few quick thoughts before I get back to bar studies:
- Justice Kagan’s first opinion is in the first case she heard on the Supreme Court. True to tradition, it’s a dog of a case.
- Justice Scalia is the lone dissent, breaking from the tradition of unanimity for a new justice’s first opinion. Last year, Justice Thomas concurred in part in Justice Sotomayor’s first opinion. Does two years away from the tradition mean it’s no longer a tradition?
- Kagan wasted no time getting into a footnote scuffle with Scalia over the textual relevance of consulting the IRS’s “Collection Financial Standards”:
- Kagan, fn7 – “Because the dissent appears to misunderstand our use of the Collection Financial Standards, and because it may be important for future cases to be clear on this point, we emphasize again that the statute does not “incorporat[e]” or otherwise “impor[t]” the IRS’s guidance. Post, at 1, 4 (opinion of SCALIA, J.). The dissent questions what possible basis except incorporation could justify our consulting the IRS’s view, post, at 4, n., but we think that basis obvious: The IRS creates the National and Local Standards referenced in the statute, revises them as it deems necessary, and uses them every day. The agency might,therefore, have something insightful and persuasive (albeit not controlling) to say about them.
- Scalia, fn* – “The Court protests that I misunderstand its use of the Collection Financial Standards. Its opinion does not, it says, find them to beincorporated by the Bankruptcy Code; they simply “reinforc[e] our conclusion that . . . a debtor seeking to claim this deduction must makesome loan or lease payments.” Ante, at 10. True enough, the opinionsays that the Bankruptcy Code “does not incorporate the IRS’s guidelines,” but it immediately continues that “courts may consult this material in interpreting the National and Local Standards” so long as itis not “at odds with the statutory language.” Ibid. In the presentcontext, the real-world difference between finding the guidelines incorporated and finding it appropriate to consult them escapes me, since I can imagine no basis for consulting them unless Congress meant them to be consulted, which would mean they are incorporated. And without incorporation, they are at odds with the statutory language, which otherwise contains no hint that eligibility for a Car Ownership deduction requires anything other than ownership of a car.”
- Does citing midcentury UK law count as a dreaded citation to foreign law? Scalia: “The canon against superfluity is not a canon against verbosity.When a thought could have been expressed more concisely, one does not always have to cast about for someadditional meaning to the word or phrase that could havebeen dispensed with. This has always been understood. A House of Lords opinion holds, for example, that in the phrase “ ‘in addition to and not in derogation of ’ ” the last part adds nothing but emphasis. Davies v. Powell Duffryn Associated Collieries, Ltd., [1942] A. C. 601, 607.”
Back to the barstuffs.
The Second Amendment: Ramifications of Repeal
The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords in Arizona this weekend and the flurry of constitutional commentary upon the start of the 112th Congress–including talk of repealing or altering the 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments and, thanks to Justice Scalia, a renewed call for an Equal Rights Amendment–has led me to think about what would happen if there was a push for a new constitutional amendment that would repeal the Second Amendment (2A). Indeed, just a few of hours ago, Elie Mystal at Above the Law went there. The more I think about it, the more it appears that such a repeal effort would paradoxically lead the most passionate gun rights advocates to embrace the dissenters’ views in Heller and McDonald in ways never anticipated by Justice Stevens et al.
The 2A, literally read, tethers gun ownership to militia membership, however hard the Heller majority tried to convince us otherwise by marginalizing the Amendment’s militia-speak as a “prefatory clause.” Because we had no standing federal army at the time of the 2A’s ratification, and because states formed militias comprised of each state’s able-bodied men, individuals needed the right to own guns in case a tyrannical federal government did raise an army to invade the states.
But if we were to take Sharron Angle’s incendiary and irresponsible “Second Amendment remedies” quip from this summer in a charitably originalist manner, then those remedies mean the right of any people to rise up in revolution against a tyrannical government. This right is explicitly stated in our country’s Declaration of Independence and endorsed by Thomas Jefferson with his quote, “[t]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.” And, unless an American revolutionary wants to wage guerrilla war or commit acts of terrorism, the accepted way to do this is to form militias, armed by individuals exercising their 2A rights, to engage in conventional warfare with the federal government. Of course, just because the right to rise up in revolt exists doesn’t mean the cause is actually righteous or that the federal government cannot seek the perpetuation of its own just existence by putting down the revolt. See, e.g., the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War.
Now, it’s currently unimaginable to think of Congress as currently situated ever passing a 2A repeal amendment, let alone finding 38 states willing to ratify it. But if we can get past that hurdle of unimaginability, it’s absolutely imaginable that some states and certainly many individuals would consider Congressional passage of a 2A repeal amendment, whether or not it is ratified, to be a tyrannical act by the federal government that threatens to take away both a fundamental right to bear arms as interpreted by the Supreme Court as well as a mass taking of legally obtained property without just compensation.
And here comes the paradox: anti-repeal states could very well then vindicate liberals’ 2A interpretation by calling up “well-regulated militias” to “secure” their “free states” comprised of individuals who, in joining the militias, are exercising their “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”
In other words, an amendment to take away peoples’ guns could trigger the very scenario, in the eyes of Second Amendment supporters, that the framers imagined in drafting the Second Amendment. In creating that scenario, then, gun owners would throw into relief through actual practice just how unoriginalist Scalia et al. were in their theory supporting the Heller majority.
I believe both components of this scenario–(a) the passage of a repeal amendment in Congress that (b) will trigger the mainstreaming of the militia movement–will never come to pass. As an intellectual exercise, however, it’s worth thinking through possible consequences of our responses to heinous acts such as the one that took place this weekend in Arizona.
If the shooting inspires enough political momentum for Congress to re-up the statutory Federal Assault Weapons Ban and inspire state and local governments to strengthen their gun regulations, then it is worth looking to the Court for how politics has and will influence its shaping of the Second Amendment.
Heller could not have been decided the way it was had it not been for the rise in the last half-century of the “individualist” narrative. Whether or not that narrative constituted “fraud,” as Chief Justice Burger stated from retirement in 1991, it became a tenet of modern conservatism and so mainstream a strain of American political thought that many Democratic politicians–including then-Senator Barack Obama, former Senator Russ Feingold, and Representative Gabby Giffords–supported Heller‘s result. In essence, the conservative majority in Heller may have inflamed the half of the public rooting for the “collectivist”–or militia-based–interpretation, but the political winds had pushed the Court’s decision into safe harbor.
Had the liberal dissent prevailed in Heller, the country would have had a massive administrability problem that could have quickly descended into political chaos and violence. Who gets to keep his or her guns? What guns remain protected? Can the federal government, finding militias anachronistic, ban guns altogether throughout the country?
While the Heller decision is often rightly explained in ideological terms, it still got the pragmatics right: it relieved the country of its polarized, zero-sum politics over gun rights on the side of least ideological and practical resistance, while defining the right so narrowly as to leave for later cases the true scope of reasonable regulations of the individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
It remains easy to imagine that a Democratic nominee to Justices Kennedy’s or Scalia’s seat could lead to a reversal of Heller or so broad an acceptance of reasonable regulations as to limit Heller to its specific facts. But now that this country’s steady stream of massacres has finally flooded into Congress and the Judiciary with the shooting of Rep. Giffords and the slaying of Chief Judge John Roll, perhaps the Court as presently constituted will be inspired by Justice Breyer’s Heller dissent to look more kindly upon state, local, and federal gun regulations than they would have had such violence remained for them a political and legal abstraction.
UPDATE: Josh Blackman responds.
UPDATE II: Michael Doyle of McClatchy has an article headlined, “Arizona shootings unlikely to change federal gun laws.” (h/t How Appealing)
UPDATE III: Jo Becker & Michael Luo of the New York Times posit Tucson’s gun culture against federal regulatory efforts.
UPDATE IV: Patrick J. Charles responds at his site, The Charles Law & History Blog.
One Year @ First One @ One First
In a sleepless frenzy one year and twentyish hours ago, I created First One @ One First. I had no idea what to expect except for the inevitable freezing cold awaiting me a week and a half later on the Supreme Court sidewalk.
What a difference a year makes. I’ve learned that I could endure those freezing cold mornings, made many new friends, been given some fantastic encouragement from rockstars of the SCOTUS press and bar, became a freelance print reporter, finished law school, and, well:
All this and more has made 2010 a hell of a thrilling year. But none of it, except for that inevitable freezing cold, would have been possible without the support and feedback of my readers, mentors, family, and the FLOF1@1F. Thank you for visiting, subscribing, commenting, linking, correcting, and emailing out here in the ether. And thank you for meeting, speaking, freezing, enduring, debating, and exulting with me out there on the sidewalk. All of these contacts with you have been my true pleasure.
While my bar studies may keep me from the sidewalk over the next two months, I hope to spend whatever breaks I take providing commentary–both mine and yours, if you are so generous–on arguments and decisions. Further, I will be happy to post any reports, photos, and videos from those who do attend certain arguments that are of interest to F1@1F.
Once again, my deepest thanks to everyone who has dropped by this year. Here’s to 2011!
Bond and The Bar
On February 22, while I’ll be locked in a lecture hall taking the bar exam, the Supreme Court will be hearing oral argument in what may be the most salacious suit of the term. Bond v. United States appears so factually, legally, and politically wild that it almost makes me question my taking that term off during my 2L year: had I stayed at Georgetown rather than go to ABC News, I would have graduated in May, taken the bar in July, and been able to be at the Court in February to hear the lawyers tell the tale of a scorned woman seeking solicitude for her hell-fury under the protection of the Tenth Amendment.
In his brief for Carol Anne Bond, Paul Clement tells the story:
In 1995, petitioner moved with her mother and sister to the United States, where she became very close friends with Myrlinda Haynes, a woman who was also a Barbados native. Haynes owned a home in nearby Norristown, and petitioner came to consider and treat Haynes as a sister.
In 2006, Haynes announced that she was pregnant. Unable to bear a child of her own, petitioner was excited for her closest friend. Her excitement did not last, however, for petitioner soon discovered that her own husband was the child’s father. This double betrayal brought back painful memories of her own father’s infidelities and caused petitioner to suffer an emotional breakdown…
In the midst of this emotional breakdown, petitioner became fixated on punishing Haynes for her betrayal. Petitioner took a bottle of 10-cholo-10H-phenoxarsine (an arsenic-based chemical) from her employer, the chemical manufacturer Rohm & Haas, and she purchased a vial of potassium dichromate through Amazon.com from a photography equipment supplier. Petitioner knew that the chemicals were irritants and believed that, if Haynes touched them, she would develop an uncomfortable rash. Both chemicals are toxic and, if ingested or exposed to the skin at sufficiently high doses, can be lethal.
According to the government, petitioner went to Haynes’s home on several occasions between November 2006 and June 2007 and spread chemicals on Haynes’s car door handle, mailbox, and apartment doorknob.
These facts alone are enough to send reporters rushing to the Court, but the love triangle and poisonous revenge are backed up by crazy law and strange meta-bedfellows.
Rather than be subjected to a state charge of assault, Bond’s use of toxic chemicals against her now-former best friend got the Feds involved. They charged her with a violation of a federal statute that Congress passed in obligation to an international treaty entitled, “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction.” A grand jury indicted her under the statute’s sweeping plain language – the chemicals fit the law’s definition of banned substances “not intended by defendant Bond to be used for a peaceful purpose” – and she pled guilty after the federal judge rejected her constitutional claims against the law as applied to her.
And it gets weirder. The scorned woman turned terrorist-in-law invoked her Tenth Amendment rights, something that’s only recently come back in vogue with the rise of the Tea Party and the Affordable Care Act. Bond argued to the Third Circuit that the federal criminal law used to convict her was beyond Congress’s Article I authority and therefore invaded the province of rights reserved to the states and the people. The appeals court did not reach the merits, ruling instead that Bond, as an individual, did not have standing to bring her Tenth Amendment claim absent the state or its officials as parties to her suit.
By the time Bond petitioned the Court for review, however, the United States switched sides, officially telling the justices to let her sue. The Solicitor General urged the Court to GVR–grant, vacate, remand–the case without oral argument. The Court disagreed and ordered oral argument.
With the Tenth Amendment and Article I limits swirling in the air these days, it is striking to see the SG in this case on the same side as Bond’s other amici: Alabama, Colorado, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah (all parties to the health care challenge awaiting decision in Florida); CATO Institute; Gun Owners of America; and the Eagle Forum.
Ultimately, this case is about Bond’s standing to bring her Tenth Amendment challenge, not the merits of that challenge. Still, this case is a thorny thicket of jurisprudential themes. Textually, the law does apply to Bond. But will the patent absurdity of this law’s use against Bond compel the Court’s more textualist justices to put aside their interpretive principles? Perhaps because this question is embedded in a contest between conservative values–deference to federal law and order efforts versus the commitment to a limited federal government–the Court’s right flank may with an easier conscience forego the letter of the law for its more equitable spirit towards Bond.
The oral argument itself may simply be a formality so that someone may argue for the wisdom of the position that the United States has since abandoned rather than GVR the case without the dignity of a proper adversarial process. That someone who the justices assigned to adopt the orphaned argument for the Government is Stephen R. McAllister, former state solicitor general of Kansas and dean of the the University of Kansas’s law school. Accordingly the advocates, like the arguments they will be making, will embody a clash of legal conservatism: McAllister and Clement launched their careers from clerkships in the chambers of Justices Thomas and Scalia, respectively.
Bond brings layer upon layer of exciting stuff, from its own facts and law to its place in the moment’s larger legal-political milieu. I guess in lieu of attending the oral argument, I will just have to inspire myself with Bond’s focused rage and sophisticated legal arguments so to unleash the fury on the bar exam.
F1@1F Featured on Newsy.com
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Newsy, which puts together video news reports based on trending stories over print, broadcast, and the internet, has included F1@1F in its clip, “Liberal Voices Dominating Debate in U.S. Supreme Court.” Give it a watch above (F1@1F’s mention starts at 1:35) and be sure to visit the site to see Newsy’s good work across all areas of interest.
F1@1F in New York Times, Green Bag
The First Lady of First One @ One First and I just returned home after a day at the National Museum of American History to find the Internet bearing two holiday gifts for F1@1F:
- For the third time this year, F1@1F will be in the pages of the New York Times. Adam Liptak’s Sidebar column for tomorrow’s paper, in which he writes about Sotomayor’s spreading her liberal wings this term, concludes with references to this “amusing and astute post.” Thank you for all of your support this year, Adam!
- In addition, my ABA Journal column from the final day of the 2009-10 term is among the “Recommended Reading” in this year’s edition of the Green Bag Almanac and Reader (see page 9). I’m quite humbled and honored to be listed among some giants in Supreme Court reporting, and only hope my luck continues into 2011.
Thanks to all of my readers for making 2010 an extraordinary year. Keep your eye on the site later this week for a post commemorating F1@1F’s one year anniversary.
FIRST ONE @ ONE FIRST 
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