Supreme Court Cases Quotes

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.

In a society with a long history of discrimination, there should be a presumption that many laws with a discriminatory impact likely were motivated by a discriminatory purpose.

It is often forgotten today that Plessy v. Ferguson was not an isolated Supreme Court decision. In case after case, the Court reaffirmed and upheld the ability of states to enforce apartheid.

In short order, I became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist. I recorded a short video for Merriam-Webster’s website refuting the notion that “irregardless” wasn’t a word; I took to Twitter and Facebook and booed naysayers who set “irregardless” up as the straw man for the demise of English. I continued to find evidence of the emphatic “irregardless” in all sorts of places—even in the oral arguments of a Supreme Court case. One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales? I began telling correspondents that “irregardless” was much more complex than people thought, and it deserved a little respectful respite, even if it still was not part of Standard English. My mother was duly horrified. “Oh, Kory,” she tutted. “So much for that college education.” —

Before the corn comes up you can see a long way.

The Cherokee Nation took a case against Georgia to the US Supreme Court. With Chief Justice John Marshall writing for the majority, the Court ruled in favor of the Cherokees. Jackson ignored the Supreme Court, however, in effect saying that John Marshall had made his decision and Marshall would have to enforce it if he could, although he, Jackson, had an army while Marshall did not.

...pointed out that the corporation enjoys the same rights as a living person under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This concept was upheld in 1886 by the Supreme Court in 'Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company' and has been a fact of law ever since. I emphasized to those executives that the corporation should also be required to accept the same responsibilities as those expected of a person; it too should be a good citizen, an honorable, ethical member of the community. In the case of international corporations, that community has to be defined as the world.

1956, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case known as Bishop v. United States, ruled that the conviction of a mentally incompetent person was a denial of due process. Where doubt exists as to a person’s mental competency, the failure to conduct a proper inquiry is a deprivation of his constitutional rights.

A computer search would have given me a list of pertinent cases, but without that I had to read everything. That is harder by far, but you end up learning a lot more. I was forced to remember cases because making copies of everything was too expensive. Keeping cases in your head is good, too, because cases are like puzzle pieces floating around in your mind, and sometimes, in moments of creativity, they fall into place and form a picture. If they were words on a screen that you could pull up anytime you wished, that phenomenon wouldn't happen as easily.

As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges.

and line of cases. Justice Byron R. "Whizzer" White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of "raw judicial power," as it took these decisions from the states and enshrined their determination in the Supreme Court's reasoning.

Exclusion [of evidence] exacts a heavy toll on both the judicial system and society at large. It almost always requires courts to ignore reliable, trustworthy evidence bearing on guilt or innocence. And its bottom-line effect, in many cases, is to suppress the truth and set the criminal loose in the community without punishment. [internal citations omitted]

This 2005 opinion reveals a white supremacist legal opinion written by the United States Supreme Court that reiterates the highly problematic M’Intosh verdict written nearly two hundred years earlier. The opinion in the 2005 case, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y., was written and delivered by the iconic progressive Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In case you haven’t already guessed, I reject that form of legal analysis. A 5–4 ruling on the Supreme Court directly affects the likelihood of me getting shot to death by the police while driving to the store. It directly affects whether my kids can walk to the bus stop unmolested and unafraid of the cops driving by. I refuse to pretend to be intellectually dispassionate about such things. I refuse to act as if second-class status within my own country is one option among many. My “emotion chip” is fully operational.

Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violation of his constitutional rights and sought, as a remedy, a ban against future use of the chokeholds. By the time his case reached the Supreme Court, sixteen people had been killed by police use of the chokehold, twelve of them black men.

Such fears seemed more than imaginary because, in 1839, fifty-three recently enslaved Africans had overthrown the white crew of the Cuban slave-ship Amistad as they were being transported from Havana to the island’s eastern sugar frontier. Trying to sail to Africa, the rebels made an accidental landfall on the Connecticut coast. State authorities charged them with murder, but abolitionists intervened and pushed the case into the Supreme Court. Concluding that the Amistad’s cargo had been illegally transported across the Atlantic, the Court made its only pre-twentieth-century antislavery decision. It ruled that the rebels had been kidnapped, that they had freed themselves, and that they could return to Africa.19

held. This was before the U.S. Supreme Court changed all the laws on search and seizure. Fifty-eight of the most powerful mobsters in America were seized and hauled in by the police. Another fifty or so got away running through the woods. Also in 1957 the public was getting a close look at organized crime on TV every day during the televised sessions of the McClellan Committee Hearings on Organized Crime of the United States Senate.

Miranda v. Arizona, the most famous of all self-incrimination cases, the Supreme Court imposed procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused. A suspect has a constitutional right not to be compelled to talk, and any statement made during an interrogation cannot be used in court unless the police and the prosecutor can prove that the suspect clearly understood that (1) he had the right to remain silent, (2) anything said could be used against him in court, and (3) he had a right to an attorney, whether or not he could afford one. If, during an interrogation, the accused requests an attorney, then the questioning stops immediately.

[Justice] Murphy... who ruled against the state [anti-sodomy] law... didn't see why the Supreme Court had to dwell on the historical background of sodomy laws [before striking them down]. All one really had to know to decide the case, he reasoned, was that Texas and its legions of moralizers let people have sex with animals. End of story.

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

(1) likelihood of (2) imminent, (3) significant harm.

The struggle between the Court and the president, dramatically present in cases growing out of the Bush administration’s response

It was in the circuit courts that the justices fleshed out some important principles of federal law and jurisdiction. One such instance came in 1792 in Hayburn’s Case.

When the votes of justices in controversial cases can be predicted at the outset, constitutional law simply becomes partisan politics by another name.

Congratulations, you may already be a winner! Your case has been selected from hundreds of other appellate cases to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society. —Majority opinion in Supreme Court case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission

County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.

THE COMMON IDEA of claiming “color blindness” is akin to the notion of being “not racist”—as with the “not racist,” the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of color blindness—like the language of “not racist”—is a mask to hide racism. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America.

There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others. Abortion was (and is) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties.

Between 1799 and 1810 the legislatures of New Jersey, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania passed statutes forbidding the state courts from citing any cases decided by English courts after July 4, 1776.

In 1960, The New York Times printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism.

The statement of Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Oklahoma Bank case, is significant: “We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control. On the contrary we are of opinion that it may go on from regulation to prohibition except upon such conditions as it may prescribe.

So defendants like Walter McMillian, even in counties that were 40 or 50 percent black, frequently found themselves staring at all-white juries, especially in death penalty cases. Then, in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson v. Kentucky that prosecutors could be challenged more directly about using peremptory strikes in a racially discriminatory manner, giving hope to black defendants—and forcing prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude black jurors.

Don’t underestimate the power of a celebrity lawyer, especially if she had been a public prosecutor or advocate general in the past. She can barge into the court of any senior judge and obtain a stay on the arrest of a person. She can force a Supreme Court or a High Court bench to meet at midnight to hear her case. And Indrani is notorious for trying to bribe judges for getting favourable judgements. Of course, all these are backroom manoeuvres and no one gets to know them.

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre, and causing a panic. . . . The question in every case is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” With relatively little elaboration,

My best advice about writer’s block is: the reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly. By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it’s the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from “writing well” to “writing badly,” you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don’t like to admit it, because we’re raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let’s just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that’s a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck. We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands. We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn’t going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster. And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it’s no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC. You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you’re an asshole. So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team “I will one day write something good” to team “I have no choice but to write a piece of shit” and then take off your “bad writer” hat and replace it with a “petty critic” hat and go to town on that poor hack’s draft and that’s your second draft. Fifteen drafts later, or whenever someone paying you starts yelling at you, who knows, maybe the piece of shit will be good enough or maybe everyone in the world will turn out to be so hopelessly stupid that they think bad things are good and in any case, you get to spend so much less time at a keyboard and so much more at a bar where you really belong because medicine because childhood trauma because the Supreme Court didn’t make abortion an option until your unwanted ass was in its third trimester. Happy hunting and pecking!

In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote […] task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases.

women today are paid, on average, only seventy-seven cents for every dollar paid to men. On average, “African-American women earn only 62% and Hispanic women earn only 53% of the income of Caucasian, non-Hispanic males,” according to professor Marianne DelPo Kulow.

On May 31, 1870, invoking the new amendments as authority, Congress passed the Enforcement Act, which made racist terrorism a federal offense. To help put it into effect, Grant and Congress created the Department of Justice, with authority over all federal civil and criminal cases.

The next year, the Court decided what is generally viewed as the major case of the early years. The decision, Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), provoked an immediate backlash, in the form of the first constitutional amendment to be ratified after the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights.

As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges. At the same time, the “hard-wired Constitution,” structural elements of great significance like the over-representation of small states in the United States Senate, remain beyond the reach of any court. “The fixation on the litigated Constitution,” Levinson writes, leads people to “overestimate the importance of courts and judges, for good and for ill.

For the Supreme Court specifically, Article III makes a distinction between “original” and “appellate” jurisdiction—between the Supreme Court as a court of first resort for cases involving states or foreign diplomats, and the Court as the recipient of appeals from lower courts in all other cases.

During its first two terms, February and August 1790, it had almost nothing to do. A year after its first session, the Court finally received its first case, but the case settled before argument. Six months later, in August 1791, the Court received a second case, an appeal in a commercial dispute.

Fourth Amendment, which requires a judge-issued warrant for an arrest; the Fifth Amendment, which requires a grand jury indictment before a person is held for trial; and the Sixth Amendment, which says that a person can be imprisoned only after conviction by a jury based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The synoptic Gospels suggest that the entire Jewish council, the Sanhedrin, met on the first night of Passover to determine Jesus’s fate—this would be tantamount to gathering all the members of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House press corps together late on Christmas Eve to debate a minor case of law. If

Marbury v. Madison, the Marshall Court’s best-known case, and one of the most famous in Supreme Court history, was decided early in the chief justice’s tenure, on February 24, 1803. It grew out of the tense and messy transition of power from the Adams Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans after the election of 1800.

In the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court attempted to clarify the existing racial classifications when it established the “one drop rule”—those with a single Black relative, no matter how distant, were considered Black, even if they appeared white—but this decision only muddled an already complicated issue.

Nor did enslaved women have legal protection against sexual abuse from enslaved men. In the 1859 case of George v. the State of Mississippi, in which an enslaved man was accused of raping an enslaved female child, the Mississippi supreme court noted that “a slave can only commit rape upon a white woman” and held that “the regulations of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violation of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and battery.”38 There was, then, legally no such thing as the rape of an enslaved woman.

For almost a century after the Slaughter-House Cases, the Court followed this narrow reading of the Equal Protection Clause and refused to use it to stop other types of discrimination. For example, in 1875, two years after the Slaughter-House Cases, the Supreme Court held that it was constitutional to deny women the right to vote.

There is inherent drama to a major Supreme Court case in which the powerful institutional actors include the Court itself. Some will emerge as winners and some as losers. But it is important to recognize that outside the courtroom, in less dramatic ways, the Court continually interacts with the other branches. The Court submits its annual budget request to Congress, and the justices take turns going before the relevant congressional subcommittees to testify about the Court’s fiscal needs. Congress determines the salaries of the justices and all federal judges. When John Roberts became chief justice, he made it a priority to persuade the president and Congress of the need for a long-deferred pay raise for federal judges, a plea that fell on deaf ears.

Although the delegates appear to have assumed that the federal courts would exercise some form of judicial review over federal and state laws, Article III says nothing explicit on the subject. It states in broad terms that the federal courts’ judicial power “shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties.

In one respect, though, the Court received unfair criticism for Bush v. Gore—from those who said the justices in the majority "stole the election" for Bush. Rather, what the Court did was remove any uncertainty about the outcome. It is possible that if the Court had ruled fairly—or better yet, not taken the case at all—Gore would have won the election. A recount might have led to a Gore victory in Florida. It is also entirely possible that, had the Court acted properly and left the resolution of the election to the Florida courts, Bush would have won anyway. The recount of the 60,000 undervotes might have resulted in Bush's preserving his lead. The Florida legislature, which was controlled by Republicans, might have stepped in and awarded the state's electoral votes to Bush. And if the dispute had wound up in the House of Representatives, which has the constitutional duty to resolve controversies involving the Electoral College, Bush might have won there, too. The tragedy of the Court's performance in the election of 2000 was not that it led to Bush's victory but the inept and unsavory manner with which the justices exercised their power.

wrote Justice Wilson. Not surprisingly, the states were alarmed by this development, and a constitutional amendment to overrule the decision was introduced two days later. In 1798, the Eleventh Amendment received final ratification, providing that the jurisdiction of the federal courts “shall not be construed to extend” to cases brought by citizens of one state against another state.

courts may exercise jurisdiction: cases between states; cases between a state and citizens of another state, or between citizens of different states; “controversies to which the United States shall be a party”; admiralty and maritime disputes; cases involving ambassadors and other foreign diplomats; and cases between a state or its citizens and the government or residents of a foreign state.

Look it over some time. 'T is fine spoort if ye don't care f r checkers. Some say it laves th' flag up in th' air an' some say that's where it laves th' constitution. Annyhow, something'» in th' air. But there's wan thing I 'm sure about." " What's that ?" asked Mr. Hennessy. " That is," said Mr. Dooley, " no matther whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns.

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.

The Court’s exercise of judicial review is an ever-present and renewable source of interbranch tension. While the court-stripping efforts were responses to the Supreme Court’s constitutional rulings, Congress pushes back regularly and more productively against the Court’s statutory decisions. In the early 1990s, Congress responded sharply to the Court’s rightward turn in a series of civil rights cases decided several years earlier.

IT BEGAN WITH A GUN. On September 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the October 1939 issue of Detective Comics, Batman killed a vampire by shooting silver bullets into his heart. In the next issue, Batman fired a gun at two evil henchmen. When Whitney Ellsworth, DC’s editorial director, got a first look at a draft of the next installment, Batman was shooting again. Ellsworth shook his head and said, Take the gun out.1 Batman had debuted in Detective Com-ics in May 1939, the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States v. Miller, a landmark gun-control case. It concerned the constitutionality of the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act, which effectively banned machine guns through prohibitive taxation, and regulated handgun ownership by introducing licensing, waiting period, and permit requirements. The National Rifle Association supported the legislation (at the time, the NRA was a sportsman’s organization). But gun manufacturers challenged it on the grounds that federal control of gun ownership violated the Second Amendment. FDR’s solicitor general said the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun; it had to do with the common defense. The court agreed, unanimously.2

So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then—as we’ve seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—continuing to be silenced. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.

The jury hung at eleven to one. Promptly a new jury was impaneled. During the second trial a member of the jury came forward to report a bribe attempt. He was excused and replaced by an alternate. This jury found Jimmy Hoffa not guilty. A crushed Bobby Kennedy still had the perjury charge against Hoffa to fall back on. But not for long. The perjury indictment relied on wiretapped conversations between Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa. The wiretap had been authorized pursuant to New York State law and was a valid search and seizure of the telephone conversation under existing New York law. Unfortunately for Bobby, this was the beginning of the age of the Warren Court’s expansion of its control over state and local police procedures. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such state-sanctioned wiretaps were unconstitutional and that any evidence obtained by the wiretaps or derived from them was “fruit of the poisonous tree.

The case was a suit by a merchant in South Carolina against the state of Georgia for a Revolutionary War debt. The plaintiff sued directly in the Supreme Court under the provision of Article III that gave the Court jurisdiction over suits between a state and a citizen of a different state. The Court rejected Georgia’s argument that as a sovereign state it was immune from suit without its consent. When Georgia refused to appear, the Court entered a default judgment against it.

Nazi persecution didn’t limit itself to race. Religion, national origin, alternative lifestyles, persons with disabilities—all were targets. How would you characterize the Slavs? Gypsies? Moors? All the lines get blurred. Even within Judaism, there are many races. There are Negro Jews in Ethiopia and Middle Eastern Jews in Iraq. There have been Jews in Japan since the 1860s. Poland was fractionally Jewish, but there were still three and a half million Jews living there in the 1930s.” “But still, today it all seems so incomprehensible.” Ben raised his eyebrows. “Incomprehensible because we’re Americans? Land of the free and home of the brave? Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve authored our own chapters in the history of shame, periods where the world looked at us and shook its head. Early America built an economy based on slavery and it was firmly supported by law. Read the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. We trampled entire cultures of Native Americans. ‘No Irish Need Apply’ was written on factory gates in nineteenth-century New York.” Ben shook his head. “We’d like to think we’re beyond such hatred, but the fact is, we can never let our guard down. That’s why this case is so important. To you and to me. It’s another reminder of what can happen when evil is allowed to incubate. Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture, to denigrate a people because they’re different, and it’s not such a giant leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter.” Catherine

To Douglas, the case turned on the purpose of the First Amendment. The judge had told the jury that in Chicago, it was unlawful to invite dispute. It followed that the conviction should be overturned. After all, he wrote, “a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging.”49

In 1996 Dorothy Mackey wrote an Op-ed piece, “Violence from comrades a fact of life for military women.” ABC News 20/ 20 did a segment on rape in the military. By November four women came forward at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, about a pattern of rape by drill sergeants. In 1997 the military finds three black drill sergeants to scapegoat. They were sent to prison and this left the commanding generals and colonels untouched to retire quietly. The Army appointed a panel to investigate sexual harassment. One of the panelists was the sergeant Major of the Army, Eugene McKinney. On hearing his nomination, former associates and one officer came forward with charges of sexual coercion and misconduct. In 1998 he was acquitted of all charges after women spoke (of how they were being stigmatized, their careers stopped, and their characters questioned. A Congressional panel studied military investigative practices. In 1998, the Court of Appeals ruled against Dorothy Mackay. She had been outspoken on media and highly visible. There is an old Arabic saying “When the hen crows cut off her head.”“This court finds that Col. Milam and Lt. Col. Elmore were acting in the scope of their duties” in 1991-1992 when Capt. Mackey alleged they harassed, intimidated and assaulted her. A legislative remedy was asked for and she appealed to the Supreme Court. Of course the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1999, as it always has under the feres doctrine. Her case was cited to block the suit of one of the Aberdeen survivors as well!

in 1866, with the Civil War over and Reconstruction under way, the Commonwealth of Virginia sued the State of West Virginia in the United States Supreme Court, seeking the return of Berkeley and Jefferson Counties to Virginia. For five contentious years, the case languished before a deadlocked Supreme Court, with a final decision denying Virginia’s claims issued in March 1871. In the end, the Supreme Court avoided the question of whether West Virginia’s creation complied with the requirements of the Constitution.

It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.

The Court usually begins to issue opinions in November and proceeds to hand down opinions throughout the term. But naturally, the least controversial cases, those that produce unanimous or near-unanimous decisions, get decided first. Complicated cases or those that, for one reason or another, produce numerous concurring and dissenting opinions take longer, perhaps much longer, and only the pressure of an impending July 4 weekend may spur the justices to make the last-minute compromises necessary to bring a decision out by the end of June.

denial of review neither sets a precedent nor indicates that the Court agrees with the lower court’s judgment, points that are often misunderstood. There are many reasons that a petition might end up as “cert denied.” These include not only the occasional defensive denial but, more often, the absence of a real conflict or even a real legal issue (many petitions attempt to reargue the facts of a case) or the justices’ conclusion that a case with an interesting issue is nonetheless a “poor vehicle” due to any of a number of procedural problems.

실시간 정품인증가능합니다... 필요하신분들은 언제든 연락주세요^^ 사이트문의~홈피:hp2345.0pe.kr 카톡↔ghb8 ☎ 사이트문의~홈피:hp2345.0pe.kr 카톡↔ghb8 ☎ 사이트문의~홈피:hp2345.0pe.kr 카톡↔ghb8 ☎ 사이트문의~홈피:hp2345.0pe.kr 카톡↔ghb8 ☎ 사이트문의~홈피:hp2345.0pe.kr 카톡↔ghb8 ☎ 사이트문의~홈피:hp2345.0pe.kr 카톡↔ghb8 ☎ Lee was indicted on charges of driving a van near Cheonan Nadulmok on the Gyeongbu Expressway at 3:41 a.m. on Aug. 23, 2014, when he hit a truck parked on a shoulder road. His seven-month-old pregnant wife (then 24-year-old) died. Lee's wife had an insurance contract worth 9.5 billion won. So far, the combined delayed interest rate has exceeded 10 billion won. The court's judgment was widely mixed. The first trial acquitted him of the crime, saying, "Indirect evidence against the accused cannot prove the crime," and the second trial sentenced him to life imprisonment, saying, "The indictment is recognized given that he bought an additional 3 billion won in insurance two months before the accident." In May 2017, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Daejeon High Court with the intent of innocence, saying, "The motive for the crime should be clearer, but it is not.

Barrons’ head whipped around and he stared at me. You said nothing of this to me? You said nothing to me about my mother? What do you know about her? About me? His dark gaze promised retribution for my oversight. So did mine. I hated this. Barrons and I were enemies. It confused my head and hurt my heart. I’d grieved him as if I’d lost the only person who mattered to me, and now here we were, adversaries again. Were we destined to be eternal enemies? One of us is going to have to trust the other, I told him. Your first, Ms. Lane. That was the whole problem. Neither of us would take the risk. I had a lengthy list of reasons why I shouldn’t, and they were sound. My daddy could take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing my side. Barrons didn’t inspire trust. He didn’t even bother trying. When hell freezes over, Barrons. Same bloody page, Ms. Lane. Same bloody— I turned my gaze away in the middle of his sentence, the ocular equivalent of flipping him the bird. Ryodan was watching us, hard. “Butt out,” I warned. “This is between him and me. All you need to do is keep my parents safe and—” “Little hard to do when you’re such a fucking loose cannon.

Could the Supreme Court have been relied upon as answering this description? It is much to be doubted, whether the members of that tribunal would at all times be endowed with so eminent a portion of fortitude, as would be called for in the execution of so difficult a task; and it is still more to be doubted, whether they would possess the degree of credit and authority, which might, on certain occasions, be indispensable towards reconciling the people to a decision that should happen to clash with an accusation brought by their immediate representatives. A deficiency in the first, would be fatal to the accused; in the last, dangerous to the public tranquillity. The hazard in both these respects, could only be avoided, if at all, by rendering that tribunal more numerous than would consist with a reasonable attention to economy. The necessity of a numerous court for the trial of impeachments, is equally dictated by the nature of the proceeding. This can never be tied down by such strict rules, either in the delineation of the offense by the prosecutors, or in the construction of it by the judges, as in common cases serve to limit the discretion of courts in favor of personal security. There will be no jury to stand between the judges who are to pronounce the sentence of the law, and the party who is to receive or suffer it. The awful discretion which a court of impeachments must necessarily have, to doom to honor or to infamy the most confidential and the most distinguished characters of the community, forbids the commitment of the trust to a small number of persons. These considerations seem alone sufficient to authorize a conclusion, that the Supreme Court would have been an improper substitute for the Senate, as a court of impeachments.

no arguments are held after the end of April, so the justices spend May and June working on opinions in any cases from the term’s seven argument sittings that remain undecided. (To keep this system running, new cases that are granted after January are not scheduled for argument until the following fall, after the next term begins.) Unlike many other courts that fall behind by carrying cases over from one term to the next, the Supreme Court remains rigorously current. Any cases the justices don’t decide by the end of the term must be set for a complete new argument in the following term.

the Honour of the Crown, a concept given its Canadian form in such historic Supreme Court decisions as Guerin in 1984, Sparrow in 1990 and, most recently, the Manitoba Métis case in 2013. The Guerin case is one of those Aboriginal victories at the highest court that have shaped Canada over the last forty years. What is the Honour of the Crown? It is the obligation of the state to act ethically in its dealings with the people. Not just legally or legalistically. Not merely administratively or efficiently. But ethically. The Honour of the Crown is the obligation of the state to act with respect for the citizen.

The dilemma facing Bush and the Republicans was clear. If Marshall left, they could not leave the Supreme Court an all-white institution; at the same time, they had to choose a nominee who would stay true to the conservative cause. The list of plausible candidates who fit both qualifications pretty much began and ended with Clarence Thomas. … There was awkwardness about the selection from the start. "The fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this," Bush said. "He is the best qualified at this time." The statement was self-evidently preposterous; Thomas had served as a judge for only a year and, before that, displayed few of the customary signs of professional distinction that are the rule for future justices. For example, he had never argued a single case in any federal appeals court, much less in the Supreme Court; he had never written a book, an article, or even a legal brief of any consequence. Worse, Bush's endorsement raised themes that would haunt not only Thomas's confirmation hearings but also his tenure as a justice. Like the contemporary Republican Party as a whole, Bush and Thomas opposed preferential treatment on account of race—and Bush had chosen Thomas in large part because of his race. The contradiction rankled.

For a recent citation of John Marshall’s famous line about the Court’s “province and duty” to “say what the law is,” see the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, invalidating an act of Congress that stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear cases brought by detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy said that “[t]o hold the political branches have the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will… would permit a striking anomaly in our tripartite system of government, leading to a regime in which Congress and the President, not this Court, say ‘what the law is’” [citing Marbury].

Attempting to resolve questions of interpretation by deferring to the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution leads to several practical and philosophical difficulties. First, the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was not written by one person but was arrived at through a process of debate, politicking, and compromise. It may be that the various participants in that process had different intentions about what the amendment should mean and how it should be implemented; those intentions may even have been contradictory. Moreover, some would argue that even if the Constitution had one author with one coherent intention as to its meaning and future implementation, that intention could never be completely accessible to judges, or even historians, two centuries later. Finally, assuming for the sake of argument that the Constitutions; Framers did have a unitary, discoverable intention as to how it should be implemented in a particular case, it is not clear that that intention should necessarily govern constitutional interpretation in the late twentieth century, a profoundly different time and society from that of the Framers. The Constitution endures because it is a vehicle for the most central values of American society; but those values necessarily evolve as society changes.

All cert petitions are presumed to be denied unless the justices take further action. The first step is to move a petition from what is known informally as the “dead list” and to place it on the “discuss list” for consideration at the justices’ weekly conference. The chief justice is in charge of the discuss list and runs the conference, at which the justices speak and eventually vote in order of seniority. (The same procedure applies to the discussion and vote on cases that were argued during the week.) The conference usually takes place on Friday (Thursday in May and June), with the “orders”—the list of cases granted and denied—being issued the following Monday.

This issue was joined in a dispute over protection for the free exercise of religion that first divided the justices and then became the source of conflict between the Court and Congress. In a 1990 decision, the Court had withheld protection from individuals who claimed that their religious beliefs required an exemption from a generally applicable law. In that case, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, the Court ruled that American Indians who used the hallucinogenic drug peyote in religious rituals were not constitutionally entitled to unemployment benefits when they were fired for violating their employer’s rule against drug use.

...the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that its fair for a woman to be fired from her job if her appearance is distracting enough to threaten the marriage of her superior -- a decision spurred by the case of a dentist who fired his hygienist because even in head-to-foot scrubs, she was simply too irresistible. In the court's finding, this was totally legitimate: employers "can fire employees that they and their spouses see as threats to their marriages." It's not up to employers, you see, to be more professional and appropriate in such cases, it's up to female employees not to unwittingly lead them on by doing nothing other than having the gall to show up for work with their god-given faces and bodies.

The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a court decision, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling in the District Court for the District of Columbia in a case called Green v. Connally. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status. The Supreme Court’s Coit v. Green decision upheld the district court, and the Internal Revenue Service then began making inquiries about the racial policies of so-called segregation academies as well as the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which boasted a long history of racial exclusion.

Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

In the first fifteen chapters of this book, I hope I have made a cogent case that: (1) reward is not contentment, and pleasure is not happiness; (2) reward is dopamine, and contentment is serotonin; (3) chronic excess reward interferes with contentment; (4) business has conflated pleasure with happiness consciously and with clear-cut intent, specifically to get you to buy its junk or engage in hedonic behaviors favorable to industry; (5) government has passed legislation to make it easier to buy that junk or make easier access to engage in those behaviors to drive profit and GDP, and the Supreme Court has justified and supported these practices; and (6) buying that junk or engaging in those behaviors long-term and without thought can leave you and society fat, sick, stupid, broke, addicted, depressed, and most decidedly unhappy.

As a legal matter, then, the case seemed straightforward enough. But it was also highly political, and it placed the authority of the Supreme Court on the line. Madison was seen as likely to defy a direct order to give Marbury his commission. How could the Supreme Court uphold the rule of law without provoking a confrontation with the executive branch that could leave the Court permanently weakened? Marshall’s solution was to assert the Court’s power without directly exercising it. His opinion for a unanimous Court—speaking in one voice in the new Marshall style, rather than through a series of separate concurring opinions as in the past—held that Marbury was due his commission but that the Court could not order it delivered. That was because the grant of “original” jurisdiction to the Supreme Court in Article III did not include writs of mandamus.

In Crawford v. Washington the Supreme Court ruled that cross-examination is required of witnesses at trial unless a witness was unavailable (e.g., sick or dead). The court said that a defendant had the Constitutional right to face his accusers, that testimonial statements by witnesses who did not appear at trial were hearsay. And hearsay was not admissible. This meant victims who were too terrified to appear in court but were otherwise healthy could no longer allow prosecutors to use their statements. Post-Crawford, there is still some room for state courts to determine admissible evidence using their own discretion, but generally speaking Crawford had a profound effect on the movement of evidence-based domestic violence cases across the country. These days, victim statements are often inadmissible in court proceedings if a witness is uncooperative (as happens in as many as 70% of cases).

To have citizenship—and the rights citizenship imbued—you had to be legally classified as white. People with nonwhite racial classifications began to petition the courts to be reclassified. Now the courts were in the position to decide who was white and who was not. For example, Armenians won their case to be reclassified as white with the help of a scientific witness who claimed they were scientifically “Caucasian.” In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Japanese could not be legally white, because they were scientifically classified as “Mongoloid.” A year later, the court stated that Asian Indians were not legally white, even though they were also scientifically classified as “Caucasian.” To justify these contradictory rulings, the court stated that being white was based on the common understanding of the white man. In other words, people already seen as white got to decide who was white.9

Notice how wickedly and cunningly the serpent tempted Eve: “God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The basic sin, the original sin, is precisely this self-deification, this apotheosizing of the will. Lest you think all of this is just abstract theological musing, remember the 1992 Supreme Court decision in the matter of Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Kennedy opined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” Frankly, I can’t imagine a more perfect description of what it means to grasp at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If Justice Kennedy is right, individual freedom completely trumps objective value and becomes the indisputable criterion of right and wrong. And if the book of Genesis is right, such a move is the elemental dysfunction, the primordial mistake, the original calamity. Of

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

This failure of nerve already was manifest in the selection and confirmation process of Clarence Thomas. Bush's choice of Thomas caught most black leaders off guard. Few had the courage to say publicly that this was an act of cynical tokenism concealed by outright lies about Thomas being the most qualified candidate regardless of race. Thomas had an undistinguished record as a student (mere graduation from Yale Law School does not qualify one for the Supreme Court); he left thirteen thousand age discrimination cases dying on the vine for lack of investigation in his turbulent eight years at the EEOC; and his performance during his short fifteen months as an appellate court judge was mediocre. The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified shows how captive they are to white racist stereotypes about black intellectual talent. The point here is not simply that if Thomas were white they would have no trouble shouting this fact from the rooftops. The point is also that their silence reveals that black leaders may entertain the possibility that the racist stereotype may be true.

FORGET FERES DOCTRINE And the military has immunity! Yes! The feres doctrine! It states “the Government is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to servicemen where injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service” (U.S. Supreme Court 1950). Federal law and our Supreme Court shield acts of rape and sexual brutality in the military as proven by its subsequent ruling on a 2001 case that denied a plaintiffs right to file a civil suit against her accusers. Yet when women report the crime, it is handled internally Commanders are given the discretion to resolve complaints. The report may not go beyond his office. Many times he's part of the problem or a sympathizer with the offender. This certainly was my case! Our Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2001 that rape is an injury incident to the course of activity in the service! THE HEINOUS CRIME OF RAPE IS ACCEPTABLE AND CONDONED BY OUR SUPREME COURT! WOMEN ARE FAIR GAME FOR RAPE AND HARRASSMENT, ACCORDING TO OUR SUPREME COURT! CONGRESS IS NO BETTER! NO LAWS ARE PASSED TO PROTECT US IN THE MILITARY AGAINST THE STATUTE OF LIMITATION FOR THE FELONY OF RAPE!

Pedigree was the centerpiece of Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Though this case assessed whether a slave taken into a free state or federal territory should be set free, its conclusions were far more expansive. Addressing slavery in the territories, the proslavery Marylander dismissed Jefferson’s prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance as having no constitutional standing. He constructed his own version of the original social contract at the time of the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention: only the free white children of the founding generation were heirs to the original agreement; only pedigree could determine who inherited American citizenship and whose racial lineage warranted entitlement and the designation “freeman.” Taney’s opinion mattered because it literally made pedigree into a constitutional principle. In this controversial decision, Taney demonstrably rejected any notion of democracy and based the right of citizenship on bloodlines and racial stock. The chief justice ruled that the founders’ original intent was to classify members of society in terms of recognizable breeds.

The Republican Roosevelt wanted to fight plutocrats as well as anarchists. Their plunder of oil, coal, minerals, and timber on federal lands appalled him, in his role as the founder of America’s national parks. Corporate criminals, carving up public property for their private profit, paid bribes to politicians to protect their land rackets. Using thousand-dollar bills as weapons, they ransacked millions of acres of the last American frontiers. In 1905, a federal investigation, led in part by a scurrilous Secret Service agent named William J. Burns, had led to the indictment and conviction of Senator John H. Mitchell and Representative John H. Williamson of Oregon, both Republicans, for their roles in the pillage of the great forests of the Cascade Range. An Oregon newspaper editorial correctly asserted that Burns and his government investigators had used “the methods of Russian spies and detectives.” The senator died while his case was on appeal; the congressman’s conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds of “outrageous conduct,” including Burns’s brazen tampering with jurors and witnesses. Burns left the government and became a famous private eye; his skills at tapping telephones and bugging hotel rooms eventually won him a job as J. Edgar Hoover’s

When a serious felony case went to trial in a county like Monroe County, which was 40 percent black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African Americans from jury service. In fact, twenty years after the civil rights revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal requirements of racial integration and diversity. As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all-white for decades afterward. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case. In Deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law. Local jury commissions used statutory requirements that jurors be "intelligent and upright" to exclude African Americans and women. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional, which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors (if not selected). The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries—it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender.

The problem was revealed most clearly by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the recent Goodridge case, the case in which the Court in effect overturned the traditional laws of marriage and installed same-sex marriage. Quite central to the argument of the majority of four judges in that case was the insistence that procreation is not a requirement of marriage, and that the laws on marriage “do not privilege procreative heterosexual intercourse between married people above every other form of adult intimacy.” But the Court opened itself here to more than it realized, for by the same reasoning one may say that marriage should be open to uncles and nieces, father and daughters, who happen to be sterile and intimate. Or to the man willing to have a vasectomy in order to marry his mother? And yet, more than that: if people of the same sex may marry, why would the arrangement not be open to a father and son? We have seen cases of incest, as bizarre as they may seem, just as we’ve seen things as odd as the fellow in Maine who sought a license to marry his dog, or the fellow in Denver a few years ago who sought to marry his horse. The impulse is there, and once again it matters not at all in principle that these are rare cases. Until recently it has been rare to see people of the same sex wishing to marry. The fact that there may only be a handful of cases does not relieve us of the need to explain the grounds of principle on which we would deny these claims of marriage—once we move out of that framework of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

sure what happened after the accident was client-protected,” he told Mazzone. By their silence, “Markham and Gargan were taking the big fall to protect Ted Kennedy.” Paul Redmond doubted the lawyer-client issue would even arise at the inquest. “People were walking around Boston whaling the bee-jesus out of Paul Markham and Joe Gargan for not reporting the accident—that was so unfair. Here were two guys, good lawyers and fine men, made to look like stooges or worse by the press.” Gargan had told him he could not have reported an accident in which a driver faced a possible manslaughter charge, Redmond said. “It’s no secret Joe was a dear friend. When I left the U.S. Attorney’s office, Paul Markham took my spot.” A week before the inquest, Redmond bumped into Gargan in the elevator of the building in which both had law offices. The Boiler Room girls were “upstairs,” Redmond said. “They haven’t seen you in a long time. I think they’d like to say hello.” Gargan went straight to Redmond’s office for “a nice reunion, a pleasant chat. Very friendly.” There was no discussion about the inquest. Gargan did not want to become involved in the preparation of anybody else’s testimony. As one of two persons at the party who wasn’t “a bit bombed,” Gargan’s memory of the occasion was “clear as a bell.” So it was Gargan’s description of the party that, along with the Senator’s two public versions of the accident, would provide the scenario for inquest testimony. If Gargan testified to the Senator’s attempt to cover up his involvement in the accident as the reason he had failed to report it until the next day, he could blow the entire lid off the case. But that prospect became moot when a writ of certiorari was filed on Tuesday, September 2, asking the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to determine whether “errors of law” had been made in Judge Boyle’s ruling on the conduct of the scheduled inquest in re: Mary Jo Kopechne. Justice Paul Reardon scheduled a hearing for three o’clock. Notified an appeal had been filed,

questioning the lawfulness of a long-standing State Department policy specifying that the birthplace of an American citizen born in Jerusalem be given as “Jerusalem” rather than “Israel or Jordan” in his passport.43 The courts were asked to review this policy in light of a congressional statute requiring the State Department to describe the birthplace as “Israel” if the citizen so wished. Did the statute unconstitutionally interfere with the President’s power to conduct foreign affairs?44 The lower courts had decided that the case presented an unreviewable political question.45 But the Supreme Court held to the contrary. All the justices but one (and I was the one) considered the matter of deciding what the statute meant and whether it was constitutional to be “a familiar judicial exercise.”46 My colleagues believed the courts should not avoid the question by invoking the “political question” doctrine.47 They consequently sent the case back to the lower court for a decision on the merits.48 Though alone, I saw the case differently. “In the Middle East,” I wrote, “administrative matters can have implications that extend far beyond the purely administrative.”49 The secretary of state had argued that requiring her to stamp the word Israel on a passport would represent an “official decision by the United States to begin to treat Jerusalem as a city” under Israeli sovereignty.50 She maintained that upholding the statute would have significant foreign policy implications (a conclusion that others denied). Because of our inability to know the answer to this kind of dispute, I concluded that the merits of the case raised a political question, which the other two branches should resolve between themselves.51 What matters for our purposes, however, is that the other members of the Court disagreed with me. They thought that, even there, the doctrine did not prevent the Court from reviewing the merits of this foreign policy-related question. The upshot is that neither the classical view of Cicero nor the “political question” doctrine prevents today’s Court from reaching, and deciding the merits of, many questions in which security and civil liberties collide. But there are other doctrines, embodied in other cases, that have had much the same effect.

In the U.S. Articles of Confederation, the federal government gave itself the exclusive right to regulate “the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This power was repeated in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which further refined “trade” and “affairs” to include the purchase and sale of Indian land. The intent of these two pieces of legislation was clear. Whatever powers states were to have, those powers did not extend to Native peoples. Beginning in 1823, there would be three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee v. Georgia, Worcester v. Georgia—that would confirm the powers that the U.S. government had unilaterally taken upon itself and spell out the legal arrangement that tribes were to be allowed. 1823. Johnson v. McIntosh. The court decided that private citizens could not purchase land directly from Indians. Since all land in the boundaries of America belonged to the federal government by right of discovery, Native people could sell their land only to the U.S. government. Indians had the right of occupancy, but they did not hold legal title to their lands. 1831. Cherokee v. Georgia. The State of Georgia attempted to extend state laws to the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee argued that they were a foreign nation and therefore not subject to the laws of Georgia. The court held that Indian tribes were not sovereign, independent nations but domestic, dependent nations. 1832. Worcester v. Georgia. This case was a follow-up to Cherokee v. Georgia. Having determined that the Cherokee were a domestic, dependent nation, the court settled the matter of jurisdiction, ruling that the responsibility to regulate relations with Native nations was the exclusive prerogative of Congress and the federal government. These three cases unilaterally redefined relationships between Whites and Indians in America. Native nations were no longer sovereign nations. Indians were reduced to the status of children and declared wards of the state. And with these decisions, all Indian land within America now belonged to the federal government. While these rulings had legal standing only in the United States, Canada would formalize an identical relationship with Native people a little later in 1876 with the passage of the Indian Act. Now it was official. Indians in all of North America were property.

Now, I don’t want to be reductive, but I’ll bet half of you are here so you can someday wheedle money out of people—torts people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of!—and the other half of you are here because you think you’re going to change the world. You’re here because you dream of arguing before the Supreme Court, because you think the real challenge of the law lies in the blank spaces between the lines of the Constitution. But I’m here to tell you—it doesn’t. The truest, the most intellectually engaging, the richest field of the law is contracts. Contracts are not just sheets of paper promising you a job, or a house, or an inheritance: in its purest, truest, broadest sense, contracts govern every realm of law. When we choose to live in a society, we choose to live under a contract, and to abide by the rules that a contract dictates for us—the Constitution itself is a contract, albeit a malleable contract, and the question of just how malleable it is, exactly, is where law intersects with politics—and it is under the rules, explicit or otherwise, of this contract that we promise not to kill, and to pay our taxes, and not to steal. But in this case, we are both the creators of and bound by this contract: as citizens of this country, we have assumed, from birth, an obligation to respect and follow its terms, and we do so daily. “In this class, you will of course learn the mechanics of contracts—how one is created, how one is broken, how binding one is and how to unbind yourself from one—but you will also be asked to consider law itself as a series of contracts. Some are more fair—and this one time, I’ll allow you to say such a thing—than others. But fairness is not the only, or even the most important, consideration in law: the law is not always fair. Contracts are not fair, not always. But sometimes they are necessary, these unfairnesses, because they are necessary for the proper functioning of society. In this class you will learn the difference between what is fair and what is just, and, as important, between what is fair and what is necessary. You will learn about the obligations we have to one another as members of society, and how far society should go in enforcing those obligations. You will learn to see your life—all of our lives—as a series of agreements, and it will make you rethink not only the law but this country itself, and your place in it.

The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows:  1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:-  (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court.   2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel.   3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework.   4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity.   5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account.   6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS).   7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view:  (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions.   8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.

It’s not always so easy, it turns out, to identify your core personal projects. And it can be especially tough for introverts, who have spent so much of their lives conforming to extroverted norms that by the time they choose a career, or a calling, it feels perfectly normal to ignore their own preferences. They may be uncomfortable in law school or nursing school or in the marketing department, but no more so than they were back in middle school or summer camp. I, too, was once in this position. I enjoyed practicing corporate law, and for a while I convinced myself that I was an attorney at heart. I badly wanted to believe it, since I had already invested years in law school and on-the-job training, and much about Wall Street law was alluring. My colleagues were intellectual, kind, and considerate (mostly). I made a good living. I had an office on the forty-second floor of a skyscraper with views of the Statue of Liberty. I enjoyed the idea that I could flourish in such a high-powered environment. And I was pretty good at asking the “but” and “what if” questions that are central to the thought processes of most lawyers. It took me almost a decade to understand that the law was never my personal project, not even close. Today I can tell you unhesitatingly what is: my husband and sons; writing; promoting the values of this book. Once I realized this, I had to make a change. I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country. It was absorbing, it was exciting, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people whom I never would have known otherwise. But I was always an expatriate. Having spent so much time navigating my own career transition and counseling others through theirs, I have found that there are three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects. First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. How did you answer the question of what you wanted to be when you grew up? The specific answer you gave may have been off the mark, but the underlying impulse was not. If you wanted to be a fireman, what did a fireman mean to you? A good man who rescued people in distress? A daredevil? Or the simple pleasure of operating a truck? If you wanted to be a dancer, was it because you got to wear a costume, or because you craved applause, or was it the pure joy of twirling around at lightning speed? You may have known more about who you were then than you do now. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. At my law firm I never once volunteered to take on an extra corporate legal assignment, but I did spend a lot of time doing pro bono work for a nonprofit women’s leadership organization. I also sat on several law firm committees dedicated to mentoring, training, and personal development for young lawyers in the firm. Now, as you can probably tell from this book, I am not the committee type. But the goals of those committees lit me up, so that’s what I did. Finally, pay attention to what you envy. Jealousy is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth. You mostly envy those who have what you desire. I met my own envy after some of my former law school classmates got together and compared notes on alumni career tracks. They spoke with admiration and, yes, jealousy, of a classmate who argued regularly before the Supreme Court. At first I felt critical. More power to that classmate! I thought, congratulating myself on my magnanimity. Then I realized that my largesse came cheap, because I didn’t aspire to argue a case before the Supreme Court, or to any of the other accolades of lawyering. When I asked myself whom I did envy, the answer came back instantly. My college classmates who’d grown up to be writers or psychologists. Today I’m pursuing my own version of both those roles.

But Muslims now find themselves in a world shaped by western theories and western values. If we are to consider how Islamic communities conducted their affairs throughout the greater part of their history, it may be convenient to compare and contrast this way of life with the contemporary western model. Today the Muslims are urged to embrace democracy and are condemned for political corruption, while western scholars debate whether Islam can ever accommodate the democratic ideal. On the whole, they think not. Democracy, they believe, is a sign of political maturity and therefore of superiority. Western societies, since they are seen as democratic, exemplify this superiority. So there is one question that has to be pressed home: what, precisely, is meant by democracy? Let me put forward an imaginary Arab who knows nothing of western ways but would like to learn about them. He is aware that the literal meaning of the word democracy is "mob rule", but understands that this is not what westerners mean by it. He wonders how this meaning has, in practice, been modified and, since his questions are directed to an Englishman, he is not altogether surprised to be told that Britain is the exemplary democracy. He learns that the people—all except children, lunatics and peers of the realm—send their representatives to Parliament to speak for them. He is assured that these representatives never accept bribes to vote against their consciences or against the wishes of their constituents. He enquires further and is astonished to learn that the political parties employ what are known as Whips, who compel members to vote in accordance with the party line, even if this conflicts both with their consciences and with the views of the people who elected them. In this case it is not money but ambition for office that determines the way they vote. "But is this not corruption?" he asks naively. The Englishman is shocked. "But at least the party in power represents the vast majority of the electorate?" This time the Englishman is a little embarrassed. It is not quite like that. The governing party, which enjoys absolute power through its dominance in the House of Commons, represents only a minority of the electorate. "Are there no restraints on this power?" There used to be, he is told. In the past there was a balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the Commons, but that was seen as an undemocratic system so it was gradually eroded. The "sovereignty" of the Lower House is now untrammelled (except, quite recently, by unelected officials in Brussels). "So this is what democracy means?" Our imaginary Arab is baffled. He investigates further and is told that, in the 1997 General Election, the British people spoke with one voice, loud and clear. A landslide victory gave the Leader of the Labour Party virtually dictatorial powers. Then he learns that the turn-out of electors was the lowest since the war. Even so, the Party received only forty-three per cent of the votes cast. He wonders if this can be the system which others wish to impose on his own country. He is aware that various freedoms, including freedom of the press, are essential components of a democratic society, but no one can tell him how these are to be guaranteed if the Ruler, supported by a supine—"disciplined"—House of Commons enjoys untrammelled authority. He knows a bit about rulers and the way in which they deal with dissent, and he suspects that human nature is much the same everywhere. Barriers to oppression soon fall when a political system eliminates all "checks and balances" and, however amiable the current Ruler may be, there is no certainty that his successors, inheriting all the tools of power, will be equally benign. He turns now to an American and learns, with some relief since he himself has experienced the oppression of absolutism, that the American system restrains the power of the President by that of the Congress and the Supreme Court; moreover, the electe