AT THE COCKTAIL PARTIES I GO TO, INFANTICIDE IS FAMOUS!:

Five to Four (Jeffrey Toobin, June 25, 2007, The New Yorker)

Moving with great swiftness, by the stately standards of the Court, Roberts, Alito, and their allies have already made progress on that agenda. In Alito’s first major opinion as a justice, earlier this year, he sharply restricted the ability of victims of employment discrimination to file lawsuits. The Court said that plaintiffs in such cases must bring their suits within a hundred and eighty days of, say, an unfair raise. But, because it generally takes employees longer than that to establish that they have been cheated, the effect of the ruling will be to foreclose many lawsuits. In a similar vein, the Court upheld a death sentence in Washington by lessening the scrutiny applied to jury selection in such cases. Last week, the justices rejected an appeal by a prisoner who had filed his case before a deadline set by a federal district judge. Because the judge had misread the law and given the prisoner too much time—three extra days—the Court said that the case had to be thrown out.

Most notoriously, the Court, for the first time in its history, upheld a categorical ban on an abortion procedure.

In a country where 70%+ of the citizenry opposes partial birth abortion, it seems safe to say that the ruling is notorious only in the sorts of circles that Mr. Toobin travels in. It's a real shame that Tina Brown and Daviod Remnick have been allowed to take a once great general interest magazine and turn it into just another political rag, but no coincidence that it has been drained of humor.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2007 7:32 AM