;-)
Posted on 10/02/2005 11:04:36 AM PDT by SmithL
WASHINGTON - Chief Justice John Roberts, meet party girl Anna Nicole Smith.
While that might provide the most entertainment, life-and-death issues will captivate the Supreme Court when it convenes its 2005-2006 term on Monday. Justices will tackle the death penalty and DNA. They will weigh physician-assisted suicide and impediments to abortion. They will review law schools that resist Pentagon recruiting, and states that lure businesses with tax breaks.
The court's challenges, moreover, will extend beyond the strict legal questions embodied in the 48 cases that justices have already agreed to hear. Several dozen additional cases will fill out the court's docket in coming months.
More broadly, Roberts will be learning to assert his authority as the first new chief justice of the 21st century. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will be serving as a lame duck while the Senate fights over her replacement.
"For all we know," former acting Solicitor General Walter Dellinger said, "she might fill out the entire term."
It's a term starting at 10 a.m. Monday with a run-of-the-mill workplace case, but which will quickly ramp up Wednesday for a high-profile confrontation over Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law. By the time summer vacation starts at the end of June, justices will have confronted some of the most sensitive constitutional issues imaginable.
These include abortion, the topic that dominated the Roberts confirmation debate, though the scope of the decision-making is unclear.
"Nobody, including me, thinks a Roberts Court is about to overrule Roe v. Wade," Georgetown Law Center professor Nina Pillard said. "I think looking at the issues in those terms diverts attention from the real battleground."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Roberts will face a diet of legal hot potatoes
Are they yams or spuds?
;-)
I'm sure Chief Justice Roberts will be just the man to keep abreast of the situation.
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