Two New Cases Granted Today: For those of us who wanted something other than our Thanksgiving turkey to ponder over the holiday the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered. Today, the Court granted review in two new cases. One case involves immigration law, and the other tests whether a former service member whose military court conviction had become final may challenge the verdict within the military appeals court system. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog has this post on the grants. A link to the Orders List can be found here. In the second case, United States v. Denedo, the Justice Department has asked the Court to review the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces authority to force a Navy appeals court to review Denedo's case. According to Denniston's report, the Justice Department is arguing that the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces has overstepped the bounds set by Congress.

Property Rights, the Constitution, and Obama's Judicial Appointments: At Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has a post that asks whether President-elect Obama actually meant it when he wrote in The Audacity of Hope that "Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty.... " Somin comments that if Obama actually believes this, then "property rights should get more protection than the distinctly second-class status they have been relegated to under the Supreme Court's current jurisprudence." This should mean that Obama will appoint judges who believe that the protection of property rights is at the heart of our Constitution. However, Somin is not convinced this will be the case. Somin looks at Obama's statement that he wants to appoint Justices similar to Stephen Breyer and David Souter - and the fact that they have consistently voted against property rights in almost every major case for the last 20 years - and concludes that Obama probably does not value property rights enough to guide his choices for the U.S. Supreme Court. Somin remains optimistic, however, that Obama could have meant what he wrote in his book, and could embrace pro-property rights policies and could appoint pro-property liberals to the federal judiciary.