- Click here for the article.
During Wednesday’s hearing on Texas’s abortion restrictions, it was the court’s four liberals who filled the space that Scalia left.
They dominated the session the way Scalia used to do when he cared passionately about a subject. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all but commandeered the proceeding, ignoring Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s efforts to bring the interrogation to an end.
[Liberal justices unite in arguments over Texas abortion restrictions]
That was a change in style, and there’s more to say about it. But there were also indications that without Scalia to shore up the court’s conservative wing, a shift in the court’s jurisprudence is underway as well.
Dow Chemical, for instance, announced that it would settle a nearly $1 billion antitrust judgment instead of pursuing its plans to take the fight to the high court.
“Growing political uncertainties due to recent events with the Supreme Court and increased likelihood for unfavorable outcomes for business involved in class-action suits have changed Dow’s risk assessment of the situation,” the company said.
[Dow Chemical settles suit because of Supreme Court uncertainty]
Those changed circumstances were apparent in another of the court’s decisions last week.
A month after granting an apparently unprecedented stay to temporarily freeze the Obama administration’s signature regulation on climate change, the court denied a similar request to block a different air-pollution rule.
Roberts rejected a request from Michigan and other Republican-led states to stay the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule. The regulation was adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency three years ago to tighten restrictions on a class of harmful pollutants that are byproducts of burning coal.
