Jonathan Hutcheson, president of the American Constitution Society at MU, said the debate was held in part because of the upcoming election but also for the sake of intellectual curiosity.

“It’s always healthy to discuss these issues openly in a way that’s structured and well informed,” Hutcheson said. “Instead of just getting snapshots here and there on these issues, it’s a little bit more of a focused discourse on the subject matter.”

Carolyn Hamilton, president of The Federalist Society at MU, said the goal was to represent different views and foster discussion.  

“Something that both of our groups strive to do is just open up everything for discussion,” she said. “Neither of us are political organizations. We just like to open up current topics.”

For more on this event, feel free to follow the link below to read the article online. 

Speakers discuss impact of presidential election on Supreme Court (Missourian)

For more background on our two distinguished speakers, please visit the following links:

For David C. Frederick, see http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/profile.php?id=dcf232
http://www.khhte.com/attorneys_view.php?id=88

For Stephen McAllister, see http://www.law.ku.edu/faculty/faculty/mcallister.shtml

Civil rights advocate William L. Taylor will speak on the increasingly important topic of judicial selection at the University of Missouri School of Law. Taylor’s talk, which will take place on Sept. 4 at 6 PM in the Hulston Hall courtroom, is hosted by the MU Chapter of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

Taylor is Director of the Washington, D.C.-based Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan organization that monitors the civil rights practices of the federal government. A long-time advocate for civil rights, he was selected as the first recipient of the D.C. Bar’s Thurgood Marshall Award and is considered a “Legend in the Law” by the same organization. Taylor is also an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, where he has been teaching since 1986.

A Yale Law School graduate, Taylor’s career began in 1954, when he served as a staff member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. During the 1960s, he became general counsel and then staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Among his many accomplishments, Taylor helped to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994. Additionally, as a private attorney, he has helped minority and economically disadvantaged children to obtain an equal education by taking on the issue of school segregation. In his work on educational rights, Taylor represented minority children of St. Louis, and obtained for them the largest voluntary school desegregation plan in the nation.

Taylor has authored many articles on public policy and legal issues, as well as the 1971 book, Hanging Together: Equality in an Urban Nation. His memoirs, The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement, were published in 2004.

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy is one of the nation’s leading progressive legal organization, comprised of lawyers, judges, students and policy makers committed to promoting the vitality of the Constitution and the fundamental values it expresses.  The views of the speaker are his own and should not be attributed to ACS.

The ACS-Missouri Supreme Court Series:
 Ledbetter v. Goodyear and the Roberts Court

Panelists:  Assistant Attorney General of the State of Missouri Heidi Vollet, and University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law Professors Christina Wells and Rigel Oliveri.

Here, a video of Ledbetter describing her case before the House Committee on Education and Labor.

A quick rundown of panel discussion impressions (you can access our agenda and case summaries here) …

Bowman on Sentencing (Gall v. U.S., and Kimbrough v. U.S.)

Professor Bowman kindly forwarded me his article in the Federal Sentencing Reporter upon which he based his presentation.  You can access it here.  As the title of Professor Bowman’s article (“The Question is Which is to be Master – That is All”) suggests, recent sentencing guideline decisions have turned into a struggle between trial courts and appelate courts over the discretion judges have in sentencing using elemental and non-elemental “facts.”  This power struggle has crowded-out Congress and the state legislatures whose statutory provisions initiated the mandatory sentencing debate in the first place.  Professor Bowman expressed concerns that the narrow intra-judicial battle could frustrate sentencing reform at both the state and federal level by leaving the legislative and executive branches out of the picture. 

As he proposes in his article, Bowman hopes that the Court will fashion “a rule that permits legislatures and their administrative sentencing commission surrogates to create fact-driven guidelines with a moderately presumptive effect allow[ing] the legislature to influence sentencing through rule making and the executive to influence sentencing through presentation of evidence but giv[ing] proper scope to the exercise of judicial intelligence and authority.” 

McGuinness on Medellín v. Texas

After outlining the complicated (convoluted?) procedural background (see our Medellín “Case Summary In-Depth” available here), Professor McGuinness turned her attention toward the attitudes of individual SCOTUS members toward the authority of international law.  McGuinness predicted that Justice Kennedy’s “cosmopolitan internationalism” could contribute to a decision in upholding Medellín’s right to a habeas hearing per the International Criminal Court’s ruling, and contrary to Texas’s procedural defaults.  Professor McGuinness also predicted that, if the Court rules for Medellin, the Court nevertheless will reassert its judicial authority to “say what the law is” as a counter to the President’s memorandum.   McGuinness also critiqued the issue in Medellín as one of American “death penalty exceptionalism.”

For much more on Medellín and things related,  see the “Medellín chain” on OpinioJuris.org.

Reuben on Election Cases (Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party, New York Brd. of Elections v. Torres, and Crawford v. Marion County Election Brd.)

First, Professor Reuben outlined the recent case history leading up to Washington State Grange and Torres.  Both cases present “access to the ballot” issues that, under prior SCOTUS holdings informed by 1st Amendment “freedom of association” doctrine, likely would hold the challenged statutes invalid.

Second, Professor Reuben outlined the procedural (and political) background leading up to the Court’s granting cert. for Crawford (Indiana’s Voter ID case).  Reuben noted Judge Posner’s 7th Circuit Opinion’s  eschewing of a “strict standard” in favor of a “balancing test.”  While employment of a balancing test validates the Indiana statute, a strict scruitiny test could yield different results (e.g. the statute invalid due to an ”undue burden” on the right to vote).  Professor Reuben further noted that Indiana’s voter ID statute is the most stringent, and that states seeking to amend or implement their own statutes will look to the Court’s ruling in fashioning the stringency of their ID statutes’ requirements.

For more, see our previous post on voter ID statutes, and for all things election law, see the aptly-named Election Law Blog.