1595 search results for: Supreme+Court

William J. Brennan, Jr., has retired from the Supreme Court. In three decades on the nation’s highest court Brennan did more, perhaps, than any other American politician except for Lyndon Johnson to promote the agenda of the liberal left: the antiwhite racism of the “Jim Snow” system, radical feminism, the reduction of the authority of...

When the people’s fundamental law is ignored by the legislature, the remedy is typically to elect new representatives to set things right.  If the people’s fundamental law is transgressed by the courts, the correction is often not so easy.  Many judges are appointed for life and never have to face the electorate.  Others are appointed...

Terri Shiavo’s tragic struggle is a hard case, and hard cases, we are taught, make bad law.  Her husband, Michael, believes she is in a permanent vegetative state and that she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially.  Her parents, however, believe that she stands a chance of recovery and, further, that, as...

By the time you read this, nine Americans may well have declared the United States a nonentity. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court was supposed to decide on the constitutionality of Arizona’s SB 1070, the now-famous law that sought to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the state.  The Obama administration struck quickly after...

The Pledge of Allegiance, as this issue goes to press, is illegal for children in the public schools of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington state to recite, because it contains the words “under God.”  Two out of three judges on a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...

Homosexual couples in the Bay State are awaiting the unexpectedly delayed decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as to whether they have a constitutional right to be married.  This question may not have occurred to the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but, as this issue goes to press, it is anybody’s guess how the court...

The Supreme Court’s recent Casey decision on abortion is a memorable example of sociological balderdash. The joint decision began, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” to which Justice Scalia fired back in his dissent, “Liberty finds no refuge in this jurisprudence of confusion.” Scalia’s observation becomes painfully clear when one reads the...

Michael McConnell, to use the overworked metaphor, is the “poster boy” for the Senate Democrats’ attempts to frustrate President Bush’s promise to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.  Scalia and Thomas are the two current justices who have most closely embraced a jurisprudence faithful to the understanding of the Framers,...

At 11:30 a.m. on October 10, the Connecticut State Supreme Court legalized “gay marriage,” making Connecticut the third state, behind Massachusetts and California, to sanction the practice.  In a 4-3 ruling that cannot be appealed, because it is based on an interpretation of the state constitution, Justice Richard N. Palmer opined for the narrow majority...

Judge Danny Boggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is, for believers in the rule of law, a hero.  Judge Boggs, in an extraordinary dissenting opinion published in May, revealed profound problems with the majority of his court’s approach to law in an affirmative-action case and pointed out that his chief...

In 1994, the Republicans, for the first time in 40 years, took control of both Houses of Congress.  In 2000, after some controversy, the GOP secured the presidency.  Now, they have lost both houses and look to be well on their way to losing the presidency in 2008.  Parties lose when they don’t give their...

The Bush administration finishes its first four months in office, the big legal news is that there is no big news. There have been some hopeful signs: the appointment of John Ashcroft as attorney general; the appointment of Theodore Olson as solicitor general. Both are distinguished conservatives, the former associated with the Burkean wing of...

Ever since Hugo Black succeeded in incorporating his anti-religious prejudices and Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” into Supreme Court jurisprudence, Americans have known how a story like this is supposed to end: A parent who comes into a community objects to expressions of that community’s religious traditions in its schools.  There is no indication that...

Gay marriage is once again in the news. This time, the rumblings come not from the Sandwich Islands, but the Green Mountains of Vermont. In a riding handed down right before Christmas, the state’s governing body, the Vermont Supreme Court, instructed the legislature to extend the benefits and protections of marriage to homosexual couples. The...