The Not-So-Liberal Roberts Court by Linda Greenhouse
'The takeaway from the term that ended last week seems to be that by the time the Supreme Court, short-handed and stumbling in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, finally got its act together at the end of June, it had — lo and behold — turned liberal.
Count me a skeptic.
Yes, of course, the two major decisions at the end of the term, University of Texas v. Fisher and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, had “liberal” outcomes: Affirmative action in university admissions survived by a margin of a single vote, and women’s access to abortion, in states trying their best to shut down abortion clinics, survived by a margin of two. Empirical political scientists code these results as liberal.
But to understand the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., it’s important to get beyond the binary liberal-versus-conservative label and see these and other recent cases in their full context. We have to ask what on earth the Fisher case was even doing on the court’s docket, three years after the justices had sent it back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (which had ruled for Texas) with instructions to look again and see whether the university had done enough to justify its modest use of race.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/07/opinion/the-not-so-liberal-roberts-court.html?
