Willy Jay on the Supreme Court term

It’s an annual summer event, as much a part of our American culture as a Fourth of July barbeque – often with its own set of fireworks: Another Supreme Court term ended. It’s time to make sense of the policies and the politics.Important and intriguing decisions and alliances again this year: Birth Control and Obamacare; Privacy, police searches and cell phones; abortion protests; campaign finance regulations and more. We also may have seen a changing Court, with some two-thirds of all decisions coming by unanimous decision.How should we think about that compromise? Does the Supreme Court provide the so-called bi-partisanship our other branches brutally lack? How should we think about the policies – what’s the real impact of these decisions on our daily lives? And what about the politics? Many decisions went directly against President Obama’s priorities. What effect could there be on Midterm voting?Willy Jay has served as an Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has argued 11 cases before the Supreme Court and briefed hundreds more. He is now a partner in the Goodwin Proctor Litigation Department and a co-chair of its Appellate Litigation Practice.