In 1958, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, lay in bed in their Virginia home. Their marriage license, issued in the District of Columbia, hung over their bed. They were torn from that bed when a grand jury indicted them for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. According to the State Supreme Court of Virginia, these laws [...]
My favorite part of Wednesday’s arguments in Arizona v. United States came in an exchange between conservative lawyer extraordinaire Paul Clement and Justice Sonia Sotomayor: JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: What happens if — this is the following call — the call to the — to the Federal Government. Yes, he’s an illegal alien. No, we don’t want to detain him. What does the [...]
“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” I know, I was shocked when I read it too, ladies and gentlemen. It’s hard to believe that such vitriol, such unhinged rage, would be directed at [...]
Supreme Court Justice, baseball savior and Sesame Street star Sonia Sotomayor visited Penn today for the official opening of Golkin Hall, the new law school building. Your faithful-ish correspondent was in the room and got all the juicy quotes. And by juicy I mean inspiring and profound. In dedicating a new building for Penn Law today, Justice Sotomayor was following [...]
If you listened carefully at 10:00 AM Monday, you could hear every pundit, legal journalist, and court watcher simultaneously squeal with glee. The Supreme Court announced that it would hear what some are calling the case of the century: the constitutionality of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Since the actual cases go by the remarkably unsexy names Department [...]
It’s been something of a depressing time for news junkies. The Republican primary is so boring that we have to resort to making jokes at the expense of the incompetent (at least all these debates are keeping Rick Perry from actually running Texas). The president is leaving town for balmy beaches and economic discussions. The economies of Europe are not [...]
It’s pretty common knowledge that the Supreme Court is becoming more and more conservative. Whether or not you believe this is a good thing depends on where you land on the political spectrum. The truth is liberal presidents are simply less likely to appoint radically liberal justices. Obama had not one, but TWO chances to appoint someone to the Supreme [...]
Warning: There are some graphic and pretty icky details in this post. So the state of Texas went ahead and executed Humberto Leal. For those of you not in the know, Leal was a U.S.-born Mexican citizen, who raped a 16-year-old girl and then bludgeoned her to death with a 40-pound chunk of asphalt. Police discovered the girl’s corpse the [...]
A few weeks ago, a federal judge declared that the recently passed health care legislation was unconstitutional because its mandate requiring individuals to purchase insurance is akin to compelling citizens to buy broccoli. In other words, Judge Vinson said that the “novel” step to regulate “inactivity” is beyond Congressional authority. Judge Vinson’s ruling was reminiscent of a similar ruling last [...]
The future makeup of the Supreme Court has been the talk of the blogosphere of late, including here at ppr. I agree strongly with the idea underpinning my blog-colleague’s post. We need desperately to take the political venom out of the Judicial system. I can think of no other developed country where judges are so politicized. Even in a country [...]
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