"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.

"A Utah judge reversed his decision to take a baby away from her lesbian foster parents and place her with a heterosexual couple..."

"... after the ruling led to widespread backlash."

The internet worked.

"A Six-Figure Settlement on Campus Free Speech."

"On Thursday, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reached a settlement with Steven Salaita, a professor who had a job offer revoked by the school after he tweeted incendiary statements about Israel during the country’s war with Hamas in Gaza last summer."

"The story of Trumbo is a reminder that efforts to control screen content had existed in the past and there's always the chance..."

"... that in some case the political winds will shift and some of those ideas will become popular again in the future," says Jeff Smith, a University of Wisconsin film professor, expressing great pride in The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, a huge archive which includes — among much else (as you'll see in this short video) — materials relating to Dalton Trumpo Trumbo and Hollywood's era of "blacklisting":



As you may have noticed, there's a new movie, "Trumbo," starring Bryan Cranston.

ADDED: The commenters enjoyed my "Trumpo" for "Trumbo" typo, above, which I've preserved with a strike-through. Meaning was striven for: "Maybe AA typo'd 'Trumpo' because she sees Donald Trump as a maligned avatar of truth that the establishment is trying to suppress."

"April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce of Carbon County said the baby they've loved and raised for the last three months will be removed from their home..."

"... and sent to heterosexual foster parents because a judge said the baby would be better-off."

The women, who are legally married and were approved as foster parents in Utah earlier this year after passing home inspections, background checks and interviews from DCFS, said the judge told them there was a lot of research that indicated children who are raised in same-sex parent homes do not do as well as children who are raised by heterosexual parents.....

Attorney Mandie Torgerson, who represents the baby's biological mother, said Johansen did not cite the research he referenced in court saying only that there are "a myriad" of studies that support his order....

UPDATE: "Utah Judge Reverses Order to Take Baby From Lesbian Couple."

Those Yale student activists are "behaving more like Reddit parodies of 'social-justice warriors' than coherent activists, and I suspect they will look back on their behavior with chagrin."

"The purpose of writing about their missteps now is not to condemn these students," writes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Their young lives are tremendously impressive by any reasonable measure. They are unfortunate to live in an era in which the normal mistakes of youth are unusually visible. To keep the focus where it belongs I won’t be naming any of them here.

The focus belongs on the flawed ideas that they’ve absorbed....

It's a longish article, describing the uproar at Yale, but it does not develop the idea I am most interested in: how university faculty taught the very ideas that the students are now throwing back in their faces.

The Yale student appears to believe that creating an intellectual space and a home are at odds with one another. But the entire model of a residential college is premised on the notion that it’s worthwhile for students to reside in a campus home infused with intellectualism, even though creating it requires lavishing extraordinary resources on youngsters who are already among the world’s most advantaged....

But for many decades, in the intellectual space of the American university, it's been presented as deeply intellectual to think in the very terms that the students have processed into activism.

"Students form a perimeter around the #ConcernedStudent1950 tent village and ask media to leave."

"This is what civic-level censorship looks like at a university with the largest and oldest public college for journalism."



ADDED: The protesting students are making many rudimentary PR mistakes here and could use some training in basic protest technique. They end up looking repressive and brutish, right in front of a camera, and they keep cranking up the intimidation. The photographer knows he's getting video that he'll be able to put up on the internet, and he's using a very effective technique of remaining calm and standing his ground in the face of what looks like scary intimidation. I have walked with a camera into big, passionate protests here in Wisconsin, and — with a few exceptions — the protesters were much better prepared to resist making the photographer seem like a sympathetic victim.

As for the First Amendment: The students and the photographers have free speech rights against the government, but not against each other. At 1:43, the photographer calmly cites the First Amendment, which, he says, gives all of them all "right to be here," in the public space, which is true. One of the black female protesters says "We do have our space as human beings," to which the photographer responds, emphasizing each word: "There's not a law about that." The woman then makes what I think is the most interesting statement in the video: "Forget a law. How about humanity? Respect?" He says, "How about documenting this for posterity?"

That's right where a good conversation could have begun. The law is not the beginning and end of how people treat each other. There is etiquette and there is respect. There is even love. As human beings, we want all of that. Please respect our space is an understandable request that a person should evaluate in ways that go beyond legal rights. The photographer did engage on that level when he offered a counter-value, documentation for posterity.

Unfortunately, that one-to-one conversation ended when another woman barged in and started yelling, precluding the development of the issues about photographing people who don't want to be photographed, and the crowd —which probably didn't notice the touching moment when Respect and Documentation stood face to face —  got going with the old "Hey hey ho ho" chant format: "Hey hey ho ho/Reporters have got to go."

"A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has affirmed a federal district court’s nationwide injunction against the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents..."

Jonathan Adler reports.

In an extensive, 70-page ruling, Judge Jerry Smith (joined by Judge Jennifer Elrod) concluded that the states had standing to challenge DAPA and were likely to succeed on both their procedural and substantive claims. Among other things, Judge Smith concluded that DAPA is not authorized under existing law, nor is it justified by historical practice.

Adler excerpts from the opinion. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

DAPA undoubtedly implicates “question[s] of deep ‘economic and political significance’ that [are] central to this statutory scheme; had Congress wished to assign that decision to an agency, it surely would have done so expressly.”... Even with “special deference” to the Secretary, the INA flatly does not permit the reclassification of millions of illegal aliens as lawfully present and thereby make them newly eligible for a host of federal and state benefits, including work authorization....

[T]he President explicitly stated that “it was the failure of Congress to enact such a program that prompted him . . . to ‘change the law.’” At oral argument, and despite being given several opportunities, the attorney for the United States was unable to reconcile that remark with the position that the government now takes....

"A prominent Thai fortuneteller accused of insulting the monarchy has died in custody..."

"The fortuneteller, Suriyan Sujaritpalawong, known by the name 'Mor Yong,' died of a blood infection Saturday at the military prison where he had been detained since mid-October...."

Mor Yong was known as a celebrity fortuneteller popular with officialdom and the Thai elite.... The case focuses on sponsorship of mass biking events arranged to honor Thailand's king and queen, and accuses the suspects of allegedly seeking kickbacks and other benefits in connection to the events....

"A Massachusetts barber was awarded $100,000 after a commission found he was wrongly fired — for being blind."

So begins a Daily News article about Joel Nixon, "The Blind Barber," who is legally blind, but not — at least not yet — entirely blind.

He lost his job at Tony's Barber Shop in 2012, after his boss Tony Morales noticed Nixon's condition. He had tripped over a customer's legs, and later tripped over a chair... Morales said Nixon wasn't fired because he was legally blind, but because he wasn't qualified. He said Nixon wasn't carrying his weight and was an unlicensed barber.

Elsewhere in the Daily News: Man Bites Dog.

David Etzel, 36, attacked his mother's shih tzu Cujo in April, after getting drunk and teasing the 10-pound pup....

I'm leaving out gory details. What kind of mother names her little dog Cujo?

"At least 100 students at a high school in Cañon City traded naked pictures of themselves... part of a large sexting ring."

"The revelation has left parents outraged, administrators searching for missed clues, and the police and the district attorney’s office debating whether to file child pornography charges... against some of the participants...."

Because it is a felony to possess or distribute child pornography, the charges could be serious. But because most of the people at fault are themselves minors and, in some cases, took pictures of themselves and sent them to others, law enforcement officials are at a loss as to how to proceed. “Consenting adults can do this to their hearts’ content,” said Thom LeDoux, the district attorney, but “if the subject is under the age of 18, that’s a problem.”

There are so many questions and issues here. But let me just ask: Are we talking about anything other than nudity? If you take a picture of yourself naked, have you manufactured pornography? Maybe a little sanity could be injected into this perplexity by asking that question.

Here's something else that deserves scrutiny: The authorities are trying to divide the students into predators and victims. Students collected each other's photographs (using apps called "vaults"), "with boys and girls involved in seemingly equal numbers." But there's a focus on the football team:

Members of the high school football team, the Cañon City Tigers, were at the center of the sexting ring, [George Welsh, the superintendent of the Cañon City school system] said. On Thursday night, separate community meetings were held for parents of football players and parents of other students to address the scandal, which has shocked this quiet, semirural community of 16,000. The team was forced to forfeit its final game of the season.

Separate meetings?! Why?

Mr. Welsh, the superintendent, said in a statement that “because a large number of our high school football players were implicated in this behavior, the coaching staff and administration, after careful thought and consideration, decided that stepping on the field to play this weekend to represent the Cañon City community is just not an option.”...

I don't understand treating the football team differently. They're the "the center of the sexting ring"? It sounds like a huge group of students — female and male — were communicating, sending selfies voluntarily. It's obvious that the authorities won't accuse them all of felonies. I can't see any justification for treating the boys differently from the girls or for demonizing the football team.

I don't know what we should do about the problem of kids texting naked pictures of themselves, but it's such a widespread practice at this point that I'd lean toward educating students about why it's not a good idea. That assumes the adults really know why it's so terrible and are capable of communicating.

"Judge reopens ‘Serial’ case, allowing Adnan Syed to introduce new evidence."

WaPo reports.

Now, the court will consider a 2015 affidavit from Syed’s alibi witness, Asia McClain, in which she said she remembered talking with Syed in the library at the time prosecutors said the then-teenager killed his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. McClain said she reached out to Syed about helping with his defense, but his former lawyer never contacted her....

The court will also take up the reliability of cellphone evidence that helped the state place Syed at one of the scenes of the crime. Welch wrote that the court will also take up Syed’s former attorney’s “alleged failure to cross-examine” the state’s cellphone expert and “potential prosecutorial misconduct during trial.” In a sworn affidavit submitted last month, former AT&T engineer Abraham Waranowitz said he wasn’t given a disclaimer about the reliability of such data that he considered “critical” and “would have affected my testimony.”

The Supreme Court takes 7 cases seeking Religious Freedom Accommodation Act exemptions from Obamacare.

Explained, at SCOTUSblog, by Lyle Denniston. These cases all involve non-profit religious organizations, which the federal government has tried to accommodate. You may remember the Hobby Lobby case. That had to do with for-profit corporations, which the government argued (unsuccessfully) had no right to accommodations under RFRA. In the new cases, non-profit organizations say that the accommodations they've been offered do not go far enough:

[The government's] accommodation requires the institution to notify the government of its objection; that, the government argues, is enough to excuse that institution from any direct role in providing contraceptives to their female employees. From then on, it is the government, working with the institution’s health insurer, that actually provides the free access to contraceptives for those employees....

The religious institutions have countered that, because the plans that will provide for the access are those institutions’ own heath insurance systems, the government will “hijack” those to provide the contraceptives. The mere act of notifying the government of a religious objection, those institutions have contended, works as a “trigger” to the government to go forward with contraceptive coverage through their plans. That, the institutions have said, confronts them with the choice of violating their religious beliefs or paying the heavy fines.

The organizations argue that their exercise of religion is substantially burdened by this level of involvement in the process. If this need to avoid even direct participation counts as a substantial burden on religion, then the government must have a compelling interest and it must meet that interest with the "least restrictive means."

In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court didn't decide but assumed that "the interest in guaranteeing cost-free access" contraception was compelling. It said that the government had certainly not used the least-restrictive means, because it didn't even give the accommodation that it worked out for not-for-profit organizations.

In these new cases, the question is whether even that accommodation is the least restrictive, a question Hobby Lobby left open. As the Court wrote in that case, the "most straightforward" accommodation "would be for the Government to assume the cost of providing the four contraceptives at issue to any women who are unable to obtain them under their health-insurance policies due to their employers’ religious objections."

Commenting dispairingly and disparagingly...

... on the students at the University of Missouri Law School.

"Why only two very similar voices for this issue. Where are the 5 or 6 perspectives that normally appear in these 'Room For Discussion' segments."

"Did the Times previous editorial advocacy result in excluding women (or men) who have a differing perspective? Surely there are more than two (almost identical) perspectives regarding the treatment of transgender persons and others with reasonable and informed but differing perspectives can easily be found. This is not a 'Room For Discussion;' this is an 'Echo Chamber' for one perspective."

Says the 4th-highest-rated comment on the NYT forum: "Transgender Students in High School Locker Rooms/Can transgender students' rights be protected while recognizing other students' concerns about privacy in a locker room?" The "debates" are from the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy and from the National Center for Transgender Equality.

What are the 3 higher-rated comments?

1. "Call yourself Tarzan. Call yourself Jane. I don't care. I don't know you from Adam. But I know a man when I see one. I had better not see one in my locker room."

2. "Only a 'rights' crusader would force male bodies on females in locker rooms. It takes a reasonable person to understand why this is a problem for young females. Unfortunately, crusaders are neither reasonable nor interested in compromise."

3. "Trouble is, nearly all of these 'transgendered' kids are not transgendered in any commonsense rendering of that term. 'Presenting' as female is by definition superficial; long hair and a dress. Strip down and you still have a young man. And therein lies the problem."

Remember, this is The New York Times, which, just yesterday, ran an editorial vilifying the people of Texas who voted down an equal-rights law seemingly out of resistance to male bodies in the girls' bathroom and locker room.

"Sometime in the near future, a transgender teenager in Texas will attempt suicide — and maybe succeed — because vilifying people for their gender identity remains politically acceptable in America."

The first sentence of a NYT editorial titled "In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness."

The language is so extreme — "vilifying," "hate." It seems to me that the focus on access to women's bathrooms wasn't aimed at the transgendered at all, but on males who might take advantage of a new opportunity to engage in voyeurism and sexual assault.

Elsewhere in the NYT, I see empathy for women who are sensitive and perhaps over-sensitive to matters involving their bodily privacy and safety and encouragement to men to become more sensitive.

Is this sensitivity supposed to shut off when a more treasured/trendy interest appears on the other side of the balance?

"I am being forced to go before a court run by a religion I no longer believe in."

"How could that happen?"

The answer, of course, is that you entered into a contract in which you agreed to resolve disputes by that method.

Ohio votes against legalizing marijuana.

The ballot measure fails, CNN reports.

Yesterday, we talked about the unusual approach that was proposed: "Is there something quite different about the Ohio experiment in marijuana legalization — something wrong?"

AND: Also on this obscure election day, Kentucky elects a Republican governor for only the second time in four decades.

"How would you feel if your 10-year prison sentence depended on a dangling modifier?"

"That's the situation for Avondale Lockhart, whose case was heard Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court...."

According to federal law, Lockhart gets a mandatory 10-year minimum sentence for the child pornography if he had a prior state conviction “relating to aggravated sexual abuse, sexual abuse, or abusive sexual conduct involving a minor.” The crucial words here are “involving a minor.” Lockhart says they apply to the whole sentence. Because his prior conviction was for attempted rape of a woman, not a minor, the law doesn't apply to him. The government says “involving a minor” just refers to the last part of the sentence, “abusive sexual conduct,” not to what came before. It thinks Lockhart should get the 10 years.

Reading that description, it's quite clear that Lockhart should win and that Professor Noah Feldman doesn't know the meaning of "dangling modifier." A "dangling modifier" is what I put at the beginning of the previous sentence. The modifier in that federal statute isn't dangling. It's attached to something it modifies, but there's ambiguity about how much else it modifies.

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..."