Tag: Supreme Court

Or will Democrats sell out Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, too?

Secrecy and speechifying, collegiality and hierarchy, exceptionalism and opulence on the Supreme Court.

Jeff Sessions and the Justice Department rescinded Obama-era policy documents that provided guidelines on affirmative action.

The president’s failure to condemn Charlottesville is directly linked to voter suppression in the United States.

An “Alford plea” gets an innocent man out of jail, but keeps him on the books as a convicted felon.

In 1970, a homeless woman pregnant with her third child met with two lawyers at a pizzeria in Dallas. Did it matter, in the end, who Jane Roe really was?

Ben Schreckinger meets Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal trainer and tries to emulate RBG’s routine.

“Echo of Scalia.” “Originalist.” “Hostile to women’s health care.”

In a headline-making decision issued earlier today, the Supreme Court ruled against three Oklahoma death row inmates in Glossip v. Gross, upholding the use of a sedative called midazolam for lethal injections. Interestingly, Glossip v. Gross isn’t the first time the court has issued a major death penalty decision on June 29. 43 years ago today, the Supreme Court issued another 5-to-4 […]

The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the […]

You clerked with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What was he like? He was very, very quick. He had a sense of the human reality of the cases, which he could size up in an instant partly because because he had been a trial lawyer. He was a repository of experience such as the human […]

There is a lesson in the past fifty years of litigation. When the fight for equal rights for women narrowed to a fight for reproductive rights, defended on the ground of privacy, it weakened. But when the fight for gay rights became a fight for same-sex marriage, asserted on the ground of equality, it got […]

Passover is nigh and the Notorious R.B.G. has spoken. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has released a supplementary Seder reading highlighting the role of women in the Exodus narrative. Ginsburg—who is the first Jewish woman ever appointed to the Court—decided to contribute a feminist perspective after being asked by a Jewish nonprofit to write on social […]

JEFFREY ROSEN: What is the opinion that you’ve written that you think has done the most to advance civil liberties? RUTH BADER GINSBURG: Oh, Jeff, that’s like asking which of my four grandchildren I prefer. There have been so many. Well, in the women’s rights arena, the Virginia Military Institute case. So many people said to me, […]

Today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the police can collect a DNA swab from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices were unusually divided—conservative Justice Antonin Scalia joined liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the dissenting opinion. For some deeper context, read Harry […]

A minute-by-minute account of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the American Care Act, and how some news organizations initially got it wrong: Into his conference call, the CNN producer says (correctly) that the Court has held that the individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause, and (incorrectly) that it therefore ‘looks like’ the […]

How the Supreme Court dismantled campaign-finance reform—and how government missteps in the Citizens United case inadvertently aided in its undoing: Alito wanted to push Stewart down a slippery slope. Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of ‘electronic communications’ shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? […]

Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush, is representing state attorneys general in the Supreme Court fight against Obama’s health care law—and it’s just one of seven cases he’ll be arguing before the court: There are two ways to assess a Supreme Court argument. One is to view it as an act […]