Narrow Ruling on Voting Rights Act:  At Blog of Legal Times, Tony Mauro reports that the Court's "much-awaited" decision in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder did not strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  Instead, Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion avoided the constitutional question and found an alternative way to resolve the case.  Mauro reports that by granting the Texas Utility District a "bailout" from Section 5, an 8-1 majority found that today was not the day to strike down Section 5 of the Act.  At SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein writes that although the Court did not strike down the law today, the Northwest Austin decision "unambiguously served notice that the Justices are prepared to invalidate the statute as it stands."  Goldstein believes that Congress is now "on the clock" to change the statute before the Court gets the opportunity to invalidate the statute in a follow-up case.  Goldstein's post expresses his respect for the Chief Justice's majority opinion which serves as a "model for his philosophy of judicial minimalism" by instructing Congress that the ball is in its court, brings eight Justices together on a result to which they can agree, and still allows the Utility District to "bailout" of Section 5 requirements.  Also, check out Ashby Jones' Q&A with "election-law specialist and Loyola Law School professor" Rick Hasen on today's decision at Wall Street Journal Blog. 

Judge Sotomayor's Mentor/"Foil":  Ed Whalen writes on NRO's Bench Memos that David D. Kirkpatrick's New York Times article about Judge Sotomayor and her mentor José A. Cabranes is "oddly" written in a way that repeatedly "denigrates Cabranes and favors Sotomayor."  Whalen appears to find it strange that in comparing the two Judges, Kirkpatrick continuously refers to Cabranes' decisions as "expansive" while choosing to define Judge Sotomayor's decisions as "studiously narrow."  Judge Cabranes and Judge Sotomayor first crossed paths when Cabranes was Yale University's General Counsel and Sotomayor was a student.  Judge Cabranes then went on to serve as her mentor and eventually swore her in as a Judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Is Budgeting for Prison Really the Problem:  Doug Berman posts at Sentencing Law and Policy a commentary from Mike Krause of the Colorado Daily, which states "prison spending..., and the sentencing polices [sic] that drive that spending, [have] been constraining state spending for decades...."  In his commentary, Krause complains that as Colorado has increased the maximum penalties for felonies, and Colorado's inmate population has doubled, the state has increased spending on prisons, when it could have been spending on higher education and health care.  Berman believes this is just one more reason why "anyone concerned about government growth and excessive government spending needs to be focusing on sentencing reform."

A Very Interesting Case:  At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh briefly notes that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in United States v. Comstock, a federal powers case that will address whether the federal government can civilly commit a "sexually dangerous" person even after that person has completed his sentence.  Volokh had blogged on the case when the Fourth Circuit unanimously held that the federal government did not have this sort of power.  In today's post, Volokh predicts that the Supreme Court will reverse the Fourth Circuit decision, "chiefly for the reasons I mentioned in my initial post[,]" where he was "tentatively skeptical of the panel's reasoning."