Nation Topics - The Courts
The unspoken answer that runs through Scalia’s opinion, and that of the Court down though the ages, is that violence is normal, while sex is obscene.
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Under Wisconsin state law, it is a felony to touch a judge, making it quite possible that David Prosser will be forced to resign.
Under Wisconsin state law, it is a felony to touch a judge, making it quite possible that David Prosser will be forced to resign.
A sheriff who has stood up to Governor Walker and defended the rule of law is called in to investigate allegations that a Walker ally attacks a state supreme court justice.
With a decision barring matching funds to counter attack ads from privately funded candidates, the court has undermined one of the last tools for fair elections.
As Justice David Prosser was battling on the state Supreme Court on behalf of Governor Walker's anti-labor agenda, he reportedly attacked a justice who disagreed with him. This is at least the second instance where Walker’s highly controversial judicial ally had been accused of abusing a female colleague on the high court.
Eric takes on the Washington Post, Reed Richardson dives into the Proposition 8 marriage equality battle, and the mail.
Wisconsin's recent Supreme Court election should be a lesson for states across the country—and for the White House.
If corporate America and right-wing libertarians get their way, thousands of female Wal-Mart employees will never get the substance of their case heard in court.
I don’t begrudge Wendy Kaminer her determination to defend Citizens United. But I do wish that she would come up with her own arguments for why she thinks the justices were right to allow unlimited contributions from corporate treasuries to flood the electoral landscape.
The article provides short reflections to United States political news stories. News stories looked at include the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing concerning the National Security Agency surveillance scandal, the investigation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Vice-President Richard Cheney's hunting accident, requests for replacement of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, and ways to lessen the effects of global warming.
The article presents an editorial regarding the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the United States Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold confirmation hearings on Alito. The editor contends that Alito's record challenges progress on privacy, civil rights, and control of corporations. A study by University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein showed that most of Alito's appeals court dissents take positions more conservative than his colleagues. A study by the Alliance for Justice also shows Alito's conservatism.
The article looks at Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, with particular focus on an article published in the November 18, 2005 edition of Princeton University's "Daily Princetonian." According to the article, Alito touted his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) when applying to become deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration. It is the author's view that CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda which included preventing women and minorities from entering Princeton. Various material published by the CAP is reviewed.
Presents an editorial discussing recent events involving U.S. President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court as of November 7, 2005. Suggestion that the Miers nomination gives the Senate Judiciary Committee a chance to redeem itself following its nomination of John Roberts as Supreme Court Chief Justice; View that the best evidence of how Miers would handle issues as a Supreme Court judge resides in her advice given to the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush as White House counsel.
The article looks at the issue of protecting reporters' sources and the public's need to know in light of the investigation being led by special prosector into the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media. What's with these special prosecutors anyway? Kenneth Starr is hired to investigate an obscure land deal and ends up impeaching the President for not coming clean about his sex life. And now Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney from Chicago appointed to find out who violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by leaking to conservative columnist Robert Novak the identity of a covert CIA employee, ends up sending to prison a New York Times reporter who never wrote about the case. Since much of the case is still shrouded in secrecy, determining the motives of the prosecutor is a mug's game. But understanding the forces in play and the issues at stake would seem to be critical to anyone who cares about the ability of the press to gather and publish the information a democracy requires. We still don't know whether Novak was actually called and what he did. In any event, the statute criminalizes leakers rather than leakees unless the leakees are engaged in "a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents." Thus far, the actions of both the special prosecutor and those he has summoned to testify have raised almost as many questions as they have answered.
Presents an editorial regarding judicial nominations in the United States under President George W. Bush. Desire of House majority leader Tom DeLay to place right-wing judges in the Supreme Court; Frustration of Senate majority leader Bill Frist at the use of the filibuster by Senate Democrats to block judicial nominations; Statement that Bush has submitted the names of Janice Brown and Priscilla Owen as judicial nominees; Possibility that the Senate Republicans will change the rules to make filibusters of judicial nominees impossible.
The article presents news briefs related to current events. The Abu Ghraib scandal has faded from Washington's radar screen--to the President George W. Bush Administration's presumed relief. Seven low-level soldiers have been prosecuted in military court, but the people in charge, starting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have avoided legal scrutiny. In an attempt to remedy this breakdown of justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor's Office against Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials, accusing them of war crimes connected with Abu Ghraib. Henry Waxman of California said in a report that government documents kept secret included those about the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, communications between the Department of Defense and Vice President Dick Cheney's office regarding Halliburton contracts in Iraq, and memorandums revealing what the White House knew about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The United Church of Christ has produced a television advertisement featuring muscle-bound bouncers determining who may or may not attend church. Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations," CBS announced, "and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the CBS and UPN networks."
Focuses on the re-election of United States President George W. Bush. Report that Bush has more power than he did in his first term because of Republican Party wins in the U.S. Congress; Plans of Bush to partially privatize Social Security; Possibility that Bush will pursue tax reform and tort reform; Report that Bush may have the opportunity to replace up to four justices in the Supreme Court, making it hostile to environmental laws and gay rights; Lack of a Democratic political leadership.
The author describes the efforts of civil rights leaders to achieve economic, as well as legal, equality for African Americans. Martin Luther King Jr., in a January 19, 1968, speech at Kansas State University titled "The Future of Integration," looked back at the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision on May 17, 1954, as "the psychological turning point, where people by the thousands began to act." These people created mass movements to implement the decision, but they also went far beyond it. Broad visions of a just society, not simply a quest to sit beside white students in classrooms or in other public facilities, animated the tidal wave of protests that followed Brown. To think that the Brown decision or even the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 could solve the problem of racial discrimination, King said in Kansas, would be "an illusion wrapped in superficiality." In an attempt to implement his larger vision of equality, King tried to organize a multiclass coalition he called the Poor People's Campaign. Ultimately, King said, achieving equality requires not only full civil rights but also labor rights and social and economic justice. To measure the distance we have traveled or not traveled since the Brown decision from this perspective, it helps to do some re-visioning of the past from the viewpoint of black workers. The interconnections between labor and civil rights crystallized in Memphis in January 1956, when the Montgomery bus boycott was in its second month.
Presents a brief commentary on U.S. president George W. Bush's use of a loophole to appoint Charles Pickering as federal court judge without the approval of Congress. George W. Bush probably should have sent Mississippi's outer space jurist Charles Pickering to Mars but instead sent him to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on a tricky "recess appointment." This was another thumb in the eye to Senate Democrats, since Pickering had been voted down by the Senate Judiciary Committee when Democrats were in the majority and not approved by the Senate last year because of severe ethics problems and segregationist views in the 1960s. The Pickering appointment clearly circumvented the will of the Senate and mocked the Constitution's advise and consent clause. That Bush did this during the celebration of what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.'s 75th birthday was an extra twist of the dirty thumb.
