"The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear its first major abortion case since 2007..."

"...one that has the potential to affect millions of women and to revise the constitutional principles governing abortion rights," writes Adam Liptak in the NYT.

The court’s decision will probably arrive in late June, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, thrusting the divisive issue of abortion to the forefront of public debate. Other major rulings — on affirmative action, public unions, contraception coverage and possibly immigration — are also expected to land around then.

But it is the new abortion case, however it is decided, that is likely to produce the term’s most consequential and legally significant decision....

The constitutional law doctrine, from 1992, forbids the state from imposing "unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion." Given the personnel on the Court, it doesn't seem likely at all that the doctrine will change, only that it might be somewhat hard to apply the doctrine to the regulations the state came up with:

The case concerns two parts of a state law that imposes strict requirements on abortion providers.... One part of the law requires all clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers,” including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Officials in Texas said that the contested provisions were needed to protect women’s health. Abortion providers responded that the regulations were expensive, unnecessary and intended to put many of them out of business....

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the Texas challenge, said officials in Texas had used “deceptive laws and regulatory red tape” to block access to abortion.... “There would be no licensed abortion facilities west of San Antonio,” the challengers’ brief said. The only clinic south of San Antonio, in McAllen, it added, would have “extremely limited capacity.”

I predict that the Supreme Court see an undue burden here. Isn't the law really, mostly a way to deter women from having abortions? It will be interesting to be pushed into thinking about abortion more than usual in the coming election year. Whether the abortion case is the "most consequential" case — more than "affirmative action, public unions, contraception coverage and possibly immigration" — it fits in a set of issues that are politically hot and that drive a wedge in a place that makes it hard for Republicans to keep people like me who can be won over on economic and security issues. And so, I'd say that Democrats should be happy about the line-up of politically hot cases in the Supreme Court.

"John O’Connor was the sole first gentleman for over a dozen years. He and RBG’s husband Marty..."

"... used to joke that they were members of the Dennis Thatcher Society, which Marty described as one’s wife having 'a job which deep in your heart you wish you had.' Marty added, 'Now let me just say that in my case it is not true. Only because I really don’t like work. She works like fury all the time. The country’s better off as it is.'"

From "'Marty Was Always My Best Friend': Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Love Story," via Metafilter, which warns "Don't read this unless you're ready to sob like a baby."

It's the way Justice Kennedy expressed his hate for the term "swing vote" that's so revealing.

"I hate that term... I get this visual image of spatial gyrations. The cases swing; I don’t."

The most revealing thing is not that he hates the term "swing vote." That's not surprising. He wants to be thought of as serious and consistent. The term impugns.

The most revealing thing is that in thinking about an abstraction, he gets a visual image and his thinking about an abstraction is, it seems, influenced by the way that abstraction-made-concrete looks in his mind.

This is useful for lawyers who are trying to figure out how to tip Kennedy one way or the other. Did "tip" just give you a visual image? If not, then you don't have the kind of mind that Kennedy seems to have.

Personally, I have this kind of mind, and I know very well how thought is influenced by language that generates images. The word "swing" makes Justice Kennedy picture a swing — picture himself as a swing, suspended, ungrounded, susceptible to pushes — and he hates (strong word!) how he looks in that image. Perhaps he sees himself as a child on a swing. Perhaps he sees himself as the bad guy in a western who's going to swing in a hangman's noose.

Stressing the vividness of the image as it appears in his mind, he indulges — even as he's speaking with notable concision — in a redundancy, adding the unnecessary adjective "visual" to "images."

So it seems that Justice Kennedy is one of these people for whom the metaphors within words feel alive. George Orwell wrote about dying metaphors in "Politics and the English Language":

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed...

What Orwell didn't say was that the effect of language varies from person to person. There is no objectivity to the perception whether a metaphor is fully alive, totally dead, or somewhere in the gray area between life and death.

The life of a metaphor is a subtle matter that belongs within the realm of the individual mind, including the mind of the man who (co)wrote: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Did he get a visual image of a heart, a beating heart of liberty? Did he see, within that heart, the universe? Did the image of the universe inside a heart blur into a mystery as he compared the universe inside a heart with the unborn baby inside a womb — two bodily organs containing — who's to say? — everything?

You may think the life of that baby is undeniably, concretely real, but do you understand how real liberty might look in the mind of a man who gets visual images?

ADDED: The Orwell quote contains the very phrase I marked as a redundancy: "A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image..."

"At Timothy Foster's trial in Rome, Ga., the prosecutor used four of his nine peremptory strikes to knock out all the qualified black jurors in the jury pool."

"The defense cried foul, but the trial judge and every appellate court after that, including the Georgia Supreme Court, accepted the non-racial reasons. The prosecutors gave as many as a dozen reasons for striking each black prospective juror. These justifications included things like 'failure to make eye contact,' looking 'bored,' being 'divorced,' or 'a social worker,' and so on."

From Nina Totenberg's report on a case that's up for oral argument in the Supreme Court today.

"The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would disclose after-the-fact changes to its opinions..."

"... a common practice that had garnered little attention until a law professor at Harvard wrote about it last year...."

Starting this term, a court statement said, “post-release edits to slip opinions on the court’s website will be highlighted and the date they occur will be noted.”

The Court is also banning "line-standers," another topic of criticism from a Harvard professor:

Michael J. Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard, said... “Allowing line-standing companies and scalpers to sell seats in the Supreme Court is yet another instance of letting money dominate democracy... It’s at odds with equal access and undermines the dignity of the court.”

Did I slight Adam Liptak? His NYT Supreme Court piece is titled: "Supreme Court Prepares to Take On Politically Charged Cases."

My first post of the day — my first-Monday-in-October post — focuses on the Washington Post article "because the headline so perfectly sums up the reason mainstream media think you could or should care: 'Supreme Court faces politically charged election-year docket.'"

But now I see the NYT article has nearly the same headline: "Supreme Court Prepares to Take On Politically Charged Cases."

Politically Charged!!!

Is that some kind of secret code or do court-focused reporters just naturally end up there? The idea — as observed in the earlier post — is, I think, that ordinary reader will only be interested in the court if they feel that it's really politics. That's simple titillation. But, of course, I must also suspect The Washington Post and The New York Times of continually massaging its readers into voting for liberals, and creating anxiety about the Court's effect on political issues is the longstanding convention.

But "politically charged" is a great phrase, one I'm going to watch. It lets you call things political without taking responsibility for charging anyone with responsibility for the politically charge. For example, it was said that the Pope's visit to the U.S. was "politically charged," but that didn't mean the Pope is a politico. He might be, but the headline wasn't saying so.

ADDED: The New York Times celebrates the tweeting expertise of Donald Trump in "Pithy, Mean and Powerful: How Donald Trump Mastered Twitter for 2016."

In an interview at his office — interrupted repeatedly by Mr. Trump’s picking up his Samsung Galaxy cellphone, loading new tweets with his index finger and marveling at his nonstop mentions (“Watch this!” he implored) — the candidate compared his Twitter feed to a newspaper with a single, glorious voice: his own.

“The Ernest Hemingway of a hundred and forty characters,” he said, quoting a fan.

In the past, Mr. Trump said, when dealing with a dishonest rival “there was nothing you can do other than sue.”

“Which I’ve done,” he added. “But it’s a long process.”

Now, he simply tweets. Caustically, colorfully and repeatedly.

Suddenly, he said of his foes, “I have more power than they do. I can let people know that they were a fraud... I can let people know that they have no talent, that they didn’t know what they’re doing. You have a voice.”

Much more at the link.

It's the first Monday in October, so the Supreme Court is back on the bench, and mainstream media are telling readers which upcoming cases to care about.

SCOTUSblog collects links.

I'll just read the one in The Washington Post, from Robert Barnes, which I'm choosing because the headline so perfectly sums up the reason mainstream media think you could or should care: "Supreme Court faces politically charged election-year docket."

The "politically charged" issues that might matter to an ordinary person — because they might affect how you'll vote in the presidential election (the all-important question of our time) — are: "the legality of racial preferences to encourage diversity; how far government must go to accommodate religious liberty; how far government may go to restrict a woman’s right to abortion."

I'm not an ordinary person. I'm a law professor, and I've been a law professor for a very long time. From that perspective, I'm going to home in on the language discrepancy between: "how far government must go to accommodate religious liberty" and "how far government may go to restrict a woman’s right to abortion."

The "must" is deceptive if not wrong. The cases about accommodating religious believers are not about what the Constitution requires — what government must do — but about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act ("RFRA") — which is a limitation that the federal government chose to take on and which the government may change by statute. We already know — and the current cases are not about — that the government need only treat religious believers the same as everybody else when it comes to regulating conduct. That's the constitutional law. As I've explained before on this blog, RFRA was a reaction to the Court's rejection of constitutionally required accommodation: "The RFRA bill was sponsored in the House by Congressman Chuck Schumer and in the Senate by Teddy Kennedy. (Each had a GOP co-sponsor). The Democrats controlled Congress, but the Republicans all voted for it too (with the sole exception of [arch-conservative] Jesse Helms)." President Clinton signed the bill, which he effused over: "The power of God is such that even in the legislative process miracles can happen."

The government — Democrats and Republicans — chose to accommodate religion, and the Court is simply stuck determining what their statute means. Government can repeal or amend RFRA or put language in statutes (e.g., the Affordable Care Act) saying RFRA doesn't apply, so we are not talking about how far government must go to accommodate religious liberty.

Adjust your presidential preferences accordingly.

Linda Greenhouse writes about "A Chief Justice Without a Friend."

That headline — in the NYT — reminds me of the junior high school taunt: Nobody likes you.

... I can’t think of a chief justice who has been so uniformly vilified by both left and right. The attacks from the left are logical enough. It’s the fire from the right that merits closer observation...

Think about the Affordable Care Act cases, really the only two important decisions by which Chief Justice Roberts has left his erstwhile friends empty-handed. What explains the obsession with these two decisions that would lead people who should be thrilled with his overall performance to want instead to throw him under the bus?...

Greenhouse says Roberts "didn’t get the memo" that judicial conservatism has changed and is no longer grounded in judicial restraint. (This is, by the way, an observation that liberals have been making since at least 1981, when it was the theme of the dean's speech at my law school graduation.)

Remember when “judicial activism” was a nasty label that conservatives hurled at liberals and when “legislating from the bench” was the worst thing a judge could do? Not, it seems, any more. Josh Blackman and Randy Barnett, two law professors who are advising Senator Rand Paul’s presidential campaign (Professor Barnett was an architect of the first Affordable Care Act case), wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard last month that “presidential candidates should reject the vapid labels of ‘restraint’ and ‘legislating from the bench.’ ” Rather, they argued, “The heart of the inquiry should be whether the nominee is willing to engage and enforce the Constitution against the other branches, not whether they can parrot clichés about ‘strict constructionism’ or ‘calling balls and strikes’ during a confirmation hearing.” In other words, judicial “engagement” is good. Judicial restraint is a dereliction of duty.