Dr. Samuel Francis is an outstanding scholar, and he is usually right on target, but, speaking as an attorney, I’m afraid his article “Tribunals for Terror” (Views, March) is seriously flawed. Supporters have argued that tribunals are necessary, in part, to avoid potential intimidation of jurors. Dr. Francis, however, believes that Timothy McVeigh and the...
1595 search results for: Supreme+Court
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Conservative Credo: Abortion Rights
ABORTION AS SELF-DENIAL In a rationalist system of ethics, every basic principle must be stated in universal terms in which “I” am denied a privileged perspective. I may not, for example, make rules that apply to everyone but me–only the Congress of the United States is free to do that. If I advocate an unrestricted...
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The Roots of America’s Mentally Ill Homelessness Crisis
The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill has intensified the homelessness crisis across American cities.
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Keeping History
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...
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Metaphors Have Consequences
“The adulterous connection of church and state.” —Thomas Paine Is “separation of Church and State” a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution? Should it be? The answers of constitutional historians Daniel L. Dreisbach and Philip Hamburger fly in the face of conventional wisdom, embodied in such cases as Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe...
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Vagrancy Law
San Francisco’s municipal palace looks like the Wicked Witch of the West might live there, only there aren’t any flying monkeys. But several years ago, the monkeys set up housekeeping right out front. Supplied with food, clothing, tents, and other amenities by “community activists,” hundreds of wild-eyed tramps extorted money from passersby, drank cheap wine,...
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Kim Davis vs. Judicial Tyranny
“If the law supposes that, the law is a ass—a idiot.” Charles Dickens gave that line to Mr. Bumble in “Oliver Twist.” And it sums up the judgment of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis about the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which said the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry. Davis refused to...
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Supreme Subjectivism and Arbitrary Abortion
A half-century ago, in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Supreme Court referred to the “basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” as “settled doctrine” and “a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.” If the Founding Fathers were rolling in their graves in 1958, they...
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“Gay Marriage” in California: Back in the Docket
In modern America, the absurd is forced on everyone with the full coercive powers of an omnipotent state—all in the name of “rights.” Same-sex “marriage” first was “legalized” in 2003 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court drove matrimony off Chappaquiddick’s Dike Bridge and let it drown. In October 2008, Connecticut’s Supreme Court did the same....
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Flies in the Ointment
Supporters of school vouchers are jumping for joy over a Wisconsin Supreme Court verdict, handed down this summer, that permits tax dollars to be used at religious schools. They hope the decision will be the basis of a vast expansion of vouchers (four other states are debating this same question), eventually leading to a federal...
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Religion and the Workplace
Harassed any hirelings lately? Don’t think so? Let’s see. Do you refer to the office Christmas party as a “Christmas party”? Sing carols and say grace? Invite your employees to join you for church? Wear “precious feet” on your lapels and plead with subordinates not to abort? Lead morning prayers over the P.A. system? The...
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One Nation Divisible
Something extraordinary has happened over the last decade or so—something neither the Republican nor Democratic leadership seems to understand. A large and growing number of Americans are now openly saying that much of what the central government does is not simply wasteful, corrupt, and destructive but illegitimate as well. This year the central government will...
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Judging Judge Gorsuch
A guide to the Neil Gorsuch nomination uproar: If you want the federal government to exercise greater and greater power over daily life in America, with minimum backtalk from us, the people, you deplore the prospective elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. If, by contrast, you regard the expansion or contraction...
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Why Are They Gunning for Gorsuch?
An uncomplimentary picture takes shape in the mind: the Senate’s Democratic minority (save for a higher-minded handful) standing in a row, thumbs affixed to noses, fingers waving provocatively in the air, mouths emitting a rude sound commonly known as “the raspberry.” Think we’re going to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court?! Think we’re going...
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Tolerance, Finally
The implosion of the right-wing official opposition Alliance Party under its young evangelical leader Stockwell Day dominates the headlines of most of Canada’s papers and feisty tabloids: Will the “gang of eight” dissident Alliance MPs be hung out to dry? Will Stock get drummed out over some Zionist-sounding remarks that set the tender Canadian sensibilities...
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Courage in Profile
Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...
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Restore the Constitution!
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
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Abortion: Fetus Liberation Fronts
It is hard to see that much good has ever come from any of the various declarations of the rights of man. Such a declaration did not save the French from either Robespierre or Napoleon, and the constitution of the defunct USSR practically glows with liberal enthusiasm for human rights. For some strange reason, though,...
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Why No Evangelical Justice?
When Republicans were warned not to give Sonia Sotomayor the drubbing Democrats gave Robert Bork and Sam Alito—lest they be perceived as sexist and racist by women and Hispanics—the threat was credible, for it underscored a new reality in American politics. The Supreme Court, far from being the last redoubt of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...
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Reviewing Judicial Review: A Government of Justices
In the most famous defense of the U.S. Supreme Court’s power to declare acts of the federal and state legislatures unconstitutional, Alexander Hamilton argued that it was the Court’s job only to implement the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution. If the Court went beyond that—interpreting the document to include things that...
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Supremes Refuse to Normalize Sleeping Rough
Municipalities can ban homeless encampments from sidewalks, parks and other public areas. Sleeping in the rough is not a constitutionally guaranteed right.
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Excluding Muslims: Facts and Fictions
Donald Trump’s call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration has drawn fire from the establishment right. “It’s a violation of our Constitution, but it also undermines the character of our nation,” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told the Des Moines Register. National Review’s Jim Geraghty opined that Trump’s plan created a forbidden “religious test for...
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Reviewing Judicial Review
In the most famous defense of the U.S. Supreme Court’s power to declare acts of the federal and state legislatures unconstitutional, Alexander Hamilton argued that it was the Court’s job only to implement the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution. If the Court went beyond that—interpreting the document to include things that...
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Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
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Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
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Quebec Secession
Quebec Secession was the subject of an historic judgment handed down by the supreme court of Canada on August 20, 1998. This question reached the court by a “reference” or “renvoi” initiated by the governor general, in effect a request by the Prime Minister and his cabinet for an advisory opinion. The judgment is not...
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Slicing and Twisting
No matter how many curses should be heaped on the head of Thurgood Marshall, recently retired from some 24 years of slicing and twisting the raw meat of the Constitution into whatever ideological pastry suited his appetite of the moment, even his shrillest foes have to acknowledge Mr. Marshall’s eminence in the legal and judicial...
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The Surveillance State Turns Twenty
Fifty-three years ago, in the fall of 1968, I was among a gaggle of idealistic first-year students sitting in a classroom at the Harvard Law School, where a crusty old professor advised us to study international law. In that discipline, “the dew was still on the grass,” he said. In those days, when many budding...
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A 28th Amendment
How different this country would be if we had a 28th Amendment which read: “An amendment approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of this Constitution.” Three-fourths of the states, if they desired, would then be able to change the Constitution without the...
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Federales, Gringo Style
For most of American history, federal law enforcement consisted only of U.S. marshals serving in the territories of the West. Their legacy is decidedly mixed. Many were appointed purely for their political connections, and graft and corruption were not unusual. The first U.S. marshal for Colorado Territory was accused of embezzling federal funds. The third...
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Dare to Be a Daniela
In early July, the United States Supreme Court, acting on a plea brought by two unidentified families, one Mormon and one Roman Catholic, ruled the practice of prayer at high-school football games unconstitutional (Santa Fe School District v. Jane Doe). Although the prayer was delivered by a girl designated by her fellow students, Justice John...
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Homeschooling: Fortifying the Family Castle
Amid the disasters happening in America today, there’s some excellent news. Homeschooling has won a solid place among roughly 1.5 million children and is mostly protected by law. It has become a refuge for families sick of their local public schools and the many copycat private and parochial schools. Even where decent private and parochial...
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Aristotelian Worms in the Leviathan
Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order? Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state. For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence. Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...
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A Bush Nominee
Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general, is, by all accounts, a skilled lawyer who has achieved a great deal since his humble beginnings as the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers. He also has compiled a track record that should trouble all those who wish to limit abortion, immigration, affirmative...
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Supremely Uninterested
In every presidential election since 1992, complaints about subpar Republican candidates (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney: The names speak for themselves) have been met with a common refrain: This is the most important election in our lifetime, because of the Supreme Court! Hold your nose and vote for...
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Trump’s an ‘Insurrectionist’—But Hillary Was Exercising Free Speech
When Republicans ask questions about the integrity of our elections it's insurrection. When Democrats do it, it's just politics.
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Believe the Children?
We may begin with a nightmare. Imagine that you are the parent of a preschool child and that one day police and child-protection officials appear at your door. They inform you that a teacher or daycare worker suspects that your child has been abused and that subsequent interviews with therapists have proven this fact to...
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A Free-Minded
Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkans were full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.) The group was...
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Obama’s Idea of Justice
When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court—in Barack Obama’s America. Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks “Latina women,” because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America...
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Yahoo Justice
The Supreme Court that has recently issued its anti-harassment decision sits in the middle of a city under siege. Justices who have pronounced the nation’s employers liable for “permitting a hostile environment” to exist in the workplace cannot walk within two blocks of the Supreme Court building without being confronted with the most hostile of...
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“Empathy” And The Court
The President wants an empathetic jurist to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He will likely get such a one. What the country will get in that event is one more senator or cabinet member—as straw boss, head knocker, high and mighty arbiter of high and mighty matters. A sort of modern Roman...
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When Prayer Left Public Life
Sixty years ago the Supreme Court struck down school prayer. This hastened the process of overturning the Western tradition in which Christianity played an integral role in the life of nations.
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Storytelling
Constitutional lawyers like to tell the story (probably apocryphal, since it’s too good to be true) that, sometime in the 1960’s, when the Warren Court was engaged in its effort to rewrite the Constitution, one crusty old Harvard Law professor, upon reading the latest product from the Supremes, stormed into his constitutional law class, roared...
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Federalizing Funerals
The Westboro Baptist Church and its bizarre octogenarian pastor, Fred Phelps, won a major victory at the Supreme Court in March. In an 8-1 decision, the Court reversed a multimillion-dollar award to the family of Marine L.Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed while serving in Iraq. In 2006, Westboro members showed up outside the fallen...
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How Posner Thinks
“The law is good, if a man use it lawfully.” —1 Timothy 1:8 Richard Posner is one of the greatest judges never to have sat on the Supreme Court of the United States. A distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit for 25...
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Divorce-Court Demolition
In The Respondent, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis reveals the tyrannical horrors of the family court system, designed especially to emasculate men.
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Michigan’s Race Factor
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision striking down the University of Michigan’s race-based undergraduate admissions policy ended a decade-long struggle started by university administrators and finished by conservative legislators and their grassroots supporters. On April 23, 1997, Michigan State Rep. David Jaye, a paleoconservative Republican from suburban Macomb County, sponsored an amendment to the...
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Corporate Rights
Tom Piatak’s contrarian view of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision (“Obama Versus the Supreme Court,” Vital Signs, May) is convincing and well stated. It is useful, however, to realize why conservative headline readers, those who probably did not peruse the actual decision or Justice Stevens’ dissent, are likely to think it a good ruling. ...
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Ditching the Cadaver
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
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Robert Bork, R.I.P.
I met Judge Robert Bork once, in the summer of 1989, when I was interning at Accuracy in Media. I was working on a feature story for the Washington Inquirer, AIM’s weekly newspaper, about the Smithsonian Institution’s use of tax dollars to fund the performance of Santeria and Palo Mayombe rituals on the Mall in...