The Supreme Court rejects an assertion of a right under the Confrontation Clause — and the 2 dissenters are Ginsburg... and Scalia.

This was a case about the "excited utterances" exception to the hearsay rule of evidence. Richard Bryant, convicted of second degree murder, was identified in a statement made to the police. Justice Scalia writes:

The Framers could not have envisioned such a hollow constitutional guarantee. No framing-era confrontation case that I know of, neither here nor in England, took such an enfeebled view of the right to confrontation....

Judicial decisions, like the Constitution itself, are nothing more than "parchment barriers," 5 Writings of James Madison 269, 272 (G. Hunt ed. 1901). Both depend on a judicial culture that understands its constitutionally assigned role, has the courage to persist in that role when it means announcing unpopular decisions, and has the modesty to persist when it produces results that go against the judges' policy preferences. Today's opinion falls far short of living up to that obligation — short on the facts, and short on the law.

Does a criminal defendant have a right to confront lab chemists?

Lyle Denniston reports on the oral argument in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts:

[Justice Kennedy] foresaw ”a very substantial burden” on the prosecution and on the courts, and told counsel advocating for confrontation that he was significantly underestimating the impact. But, as the hearing moved along, Kennedy saw as “a very important point” that California has not experienced such a burden and “gets along all right” with summoning lab analysts to the stand with some frequency...

I like the implicit federalism point here. Just as state legislatures can be "laboratories of democracy," state courts can be laboratories of rights, and here we see the California courts serving as an experiment in working with an expansive version of the right to confront witnesses in a criminal trial. Instead of needing to wonder about the burdens of dealing with a new requirement, the Supreme Court can look at the results in California.