Coverage of Summum Hearing
ScotusBlog's Lyle Deniston analyzes the argument
If a case does not fit within a constitutional pigeonhole, is there no other way to define it so that a legal dispute can be decided? That was the lingering question Wednesday as the Supreme Court tried to hack its way through a thicket of constitutional labels... The Justices weren’t even sure which part of the First Amendment is really at issue — free speech, or church-state separation.
NYTimes: Supreme Court Grapples with Summum Church Monument
The questioning suggested that the justices were finding it hard to identify a principle that would compel the city to accept the Summum monument without creating havoc in public parks around the nation.
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Ms. Harris’s answers to the series of hypothetical questions, and in particular her insistence that the city must formally adopt the message of the Ten Commandments monument, did not seem to satisfy several of the justices.
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick:
[A]s Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice learns about three minutes into oral argument this morning, if he wins this case as a result of the court's free speech jurisprudence, he will be back in five years to lose it under the court's religion doctrine. The more zealously the city claims ownership of its Ten Commandments monument, the more it looks to be promoting religion in violation of the Constitution's Establishment Clause.
Law.com's Tony Mauro
Most justices during oral argument Wednesday seemed to oppose the idea that by accepting one, Pleasant Grove City had to accept the other because of the First Amendment's bar against content-based speech discrimination by the government.
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But during oral arguments in the case Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum, several justices also expressed discontent with the Court's own First Amendment doctrines that make the Utah case so difficult to resolve.