In the second installment of the “Good Fight” series, Glenn Loury and Mark Kleiman address the voter ID question:

Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law was upheld today. Dave Weigel, who covered the trial, has more:

I saw the petitioners (against the law) give a strong case, focusing on the difficulty of getting hundreds of thousands of voters sorted out before a November election. The state based its argument on the 2008 Crawford case, arguing that you couldn’t possibly strike down a law just because some voters would be inconvenienced — voting is inconvenient! What does the state’s win mean, effectively? The ACLU will eventually take its case to the state Supreme Court, which (due to a scandal surrounding one member) is split 3-3, Democratic and Republican members. If the court splits on this law, the Simpson decision is reaffirmed.

Samuel Goldman recently noted that the “practical impact of these laws … is likely to be more limited than either advocates or critics believe.”