George Washington
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/gw1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washingtonv

by Gilbert Stuart (1755 - 1828)
Oil on canvas, 1796 ca. - 1805
Sight measurement
Height: 28.75 inches (73 cm)
Width: 23.63 inches (60 cm)

Unsigned
Cat. no. 31.00004.000
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/Painting_31_00004.htm

Thomas Jefferson
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tj3.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson

by Thomas Sully (1783 - 1872)
Oil on canvas, 1856
Sight measurement
Height: 28.5 inches (72.4 cm)            Width: 23.63 inches (60 cm)
Unsigned            Cat. no. 31.00006.000
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/Painting_31_00006.htm

The Constitution of the United States of America
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A525278
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html
http://www.house.gov/house/Constitution/Constitution.html
http://www.senate.gov/reference/reference_index_subjects/Constitution_vrd.htm
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/usconst.htm
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution.html
http://www.house.gov/house/Educate.shtml
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/constRedir.html
http://www.constitutioncenter.org/

Bill of Rights
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/bill_of_rights.html

The Constitution of the United States of America > full text

law

comply with the law
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/29/us/politics/AP-US-Gays-Military.html

State laws
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-01-new-laws_N.htm

take effect
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/health/policy/22health.html

constitutional

unconstitutional
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-24-lawyers-bush_x.htm

constitutionality
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17guns.html

the law’s constitutionality
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/us/11abortion.html

Constitution > President > recess appointments
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-05-bush-recess-option_N.htm

impeach

impeachment

Constitution > Article II, Section 4
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States,
shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of,
Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_transcript.html

George Washington
http://www.pbs.org/georgewashington/

Thomas Jefferson
http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/

 

The Supreme Court of the United States

By Mikki K. Harris        USA TODAY

Court takes harder stance on abortion
Analysis by Joan Biskupic        USA TODAY        18.4.2007
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-18-partial-birth-ruling_N.htm

Ed Stein

The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado        Cagle

2.7.2008

Background
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-26-scotus-guns_N.htm

The Supreme Court / High Court / top court
the highest tribunal in the United States for all cases and controversies arising under the Constitution
http://archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_of_freedom_8.html
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/about/photos.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/19scotus.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWAT00935320080417
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2008-04-16-lethal-injection_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-10-09-cia-case_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2006-12-04-scotus-school-race_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-02-scotus-new-term_x.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-27-detainees_x.htm

 the pinnacle of the judicial system
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27court.html?hp

Equal Justice Under Law
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/about/courtbuilding.pdf

Supreme Court nomination > Sonia Sotomayor        May 2009
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/interest-groups-prepare-to-battle-on-sotomayor/
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/obama-rallies-the-base-on-his-supreme-court-choice/

nominate ... to the Supreme Court
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27court.html

nominee
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/05/27/us/politics/AP-US-Supreme-Court-Sotomayor.html

confirmation hearings
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/opinion/21tue1.html

consider
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10scotus.html

Justice / Justices
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10scotus.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/opinion/27wed1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27court.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/27scotus.html

Elena Kagan - the nation’s 112th justice        May 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/politics/16court.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/opinion/l11scotus.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/politics/11women.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/opinion/11tue1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/us/politics/11nominees.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/kagan_elena/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10court.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10kagan.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/20100414_KAGAN_TIMELINE.html

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/john_g_jr_roberts/index.html

Justice John Paul Stevens
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/john_paul_stevens/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opinion/11stevens.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opinion/11greenhouse.html

Justice David H. Souter
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/justice-souters-class/

Justice Sonia Sotomayor
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/sonia_sotomayor/index.html

Justice Antonin Scalia
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/antonin_scalia/index.html

Anthony M. Kennedy
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/anthony_m_kennedy/index.html

U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

http://supreme.justia.com/index.html
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html

ruling / decision

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1498.pdf
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-18-partial-birth-ruling_N.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/supremecourtopinions/2007-04-02-epa-emissions_N.htm

opinion

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/08-479.pdf

concurring opinion

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZC.html

Cagle cartoons > Gun ban ban
US supreme court ruling ends localised gun control laws in America        June 2010

http://www.cagle.com/news/GunBanBan/main.asp

CHRISTIAN LEGAL SOCIETY CHAPTER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, HASTINGS COLLEGE
OF THE LAW, AKA HASTINGS CHRISTIAN FELLOW-
SHIP v. MARTINEZ ET AL.
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
No. 08–1371. Argued April 19, 2010—Decided June 28, 2010

Gun lobby victory as every American's right to bear arms upheld by ruling
National Rifle Association celebrates US supreme court ruling that ends localised gun control laws in America        28 June 2010

http://www.cagle.com/news/GunBanBan/main.asp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/28/gun-lobby-victory-american-right-to-bear-arms-ruling
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/opinion/29tue1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/opinion/29tue2.html
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/what-bolstering-gun-rights-will-mean/
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1371.pdf

landmark ruling > Individual Americans have a right to own guns        June 2008

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWBT00928420080626
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN2632797920080626?virtualBrandChannel=10179

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
GRAHAM v. FLORIDA
CERTIORARI TO THE DISTRICT COURT OF APPEAL OF FLORIDA, 1ST DISTRICT
No. 08–7412. Argued November 9, 2009—Decided May 17, 2010

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-7412.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/opinion/l19scotus.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/politics/18court.html

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ET AL. v. HELLER
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT
No. 07–290. Argued March 18, 2008—Decided June 26, 2008

http://www.cagle.com/news/Guns08/main.asp
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/washington/27scotuscnd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/washington/27React.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-26-scotus-guns_N.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSWBT00928420080626

Guantánamo > Supreme Court > HAMDAN v. RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, et al.
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit
No. 05-184. Argued March 28, 2006--Decided June 29, 2006

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=05-184&friend=nytimes

5-4 Supreme Court Abolishes Juvenile Executions
ROPER, SUPERINTENDENT, POTOSI CORRECTIONAL CENTER v. SIMMONS
No. 03—633.Argued October 13, 2004–Decided March 1, 2005

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-633.ZS.html
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=03-633
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62584-2005Mar1.html

American flag burning / flag desecration
U.S. Supreme Court
TEXAS v. JOHNSON, 491 U.S. 397 (1989)
491 U.S. 397
TEXAS v. JOHNSON
CERTIORARI TO THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS OF TEXAS
No. 88-155.
Argued March 21, 1989        Decided June 21, 1989

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=491&invol=397
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/texas.html
http://supreme.justia.com/us/491/397/
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/Speech/flagburning/overview.aspx
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/flagburning.htm
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/LAW/07/17/flag.desecration.court/index.html
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13371

The Supreme Court
strikes down laws criminalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade        Jan. 23, 1973

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24nixon.html

GREENBELT PUB. ASSN. v. BRESLER, 398 U.S. 6 (1970)
398 U.S. 6
GREENBELT COOPERATIVE PUBLISHING ASSN., INC., ET AL. v. BRESLER
CERTIORARI TO THE COURT OF APPEALS OF MARYLAND
No. 413.
Argued February 24-25, 1970
Decided May 18, 1970

in 1970 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled
that the press could not be held liable for reporting exaggerated charges leveled against public figures
when it was clear that the accusations were “hyperbole.”
The decision, in Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Assn. v. Bresler,
restricted the traditional legal assumption that someone falsely accused of a crime
can recover damages for defamation, even without proof of having suffered monetary loss because of the libel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/us/01sucher.html?hpw

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=398&invol=6
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/us/01sucher.html

terrorism > suspect > Fifth Amendment > Supreme Court > Miranda
U.S. Supreme Court
MIRANDA v. ARIZONA, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)
384 U.S. 436
MIRANDA v. ARIZONA.
CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF ARIZONA.
No. 759.
Argued February 28 - March 1, 1966.
Decided June 13, 1966.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=US&vol=384&invol=436
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/miranda_warnings/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02scotus.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16sun1.html

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
347 U.S. 483
BROWN ET AL. v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA ET AL.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS. * No. 1.
Argued December 9, 1952. Reargued December 8, 1953. Decided May 17, 1954.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=347&invol=483

dissent
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/27scotus.html

decline
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10sniper.html

reject
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-02-court-guantanamo_N.htm?csp=34

refuse
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-01-22-court-enron_N.htm

strike down
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-06-26-scotus-guns_N.htm

rebuff
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/17/us/politics/AP-US-Supreme-Court-Beach-Erosion.html

overturn
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/selective-empathy/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01penalty.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/politics/01scotus.html

vacate a lower court ruling
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/politics/01scotus.html

uphold
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/business/29accounting.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/06/21/us/politics/politics-us-usa-security-court.html

rule
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01penalty.html

Exploring Constitutional Law
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/home.html

United States Constitution > First Amendment / Amendment I
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/First_amendment

Freedom of Speech in the United States / free speech /  First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/us_constitution/first_amendment/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22tue1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/politics/16court.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/opinion/24sat1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/us/07scotus.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23bar.html
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/default.html

Search and View Full Text of Supreme Court Decisions Issued between 1937 and 1975
http://www.fedworld.gov/supcourt/

death penalty
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/opinion/l05death.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/opinion/01barr.html

New York Times > Opinionator > Linda Greenhouse
Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize,
reported on the Supreme Court for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008.
She teaches at Yale Law School
and is the author of a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, "Becoming Justice Blackmun."
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/linda-greenhouse/

 

California Supreme Court / High Court
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/27marriage.html

rules set out in the Arizona constitution
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17cavecreek.html

federal appeals court in St. Louis
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/us/11abortion.html

Congress
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-30-border-fence_x.htm

THOMAS > legislative information from the Library of Congress
http://thomas.loc.gov/

House of Representatives / The House
http://www.house.gov/

in the House

Senate
http://www.senate.gov/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-27-detainees_x.htm

in the Senate

Senator
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/termofasenator.pdf

direct Election of Senators
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Direct_Election_Senators.htm

constitutional amendment
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/06/27/flag.burning/index.html
http://sessions.senate.gov/pressapp/record.cfm?id=257938

reject
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701056.html

The Senate's Impeachment Role
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Senate_Impeachment_Role.htm

Paintings > The Senate maintains over 70 paintings created by some of America's preeminent artists,
commemorating many of the great persons and events of our national history
http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/art/g_three_sections_with_teasers/paintings.htm

approve
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-30-border-fence_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-28-congress-terrorism_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-01-offshore-drilling_x.htm

reject
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-03-minimum-wage-bill_x.htm

White House / President
http://www.whitehouse.gov/

law
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-states-illegal-workers_x.htm

law / legislation
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/college/2007-01-17-house-student-loans_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-26-bush-immigration_x.htm

a piece of legislation

constitutionality

prohibit

legalize
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-mass_x.htm

 bill
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/world/07rights.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-27-detainees_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-09-detainee-interrogations_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-states-illegal-workers_x.htm

vote

vote

pass
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-09-terrorbill_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-28-congress-pensions_x.htm

approve
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-28-congress-pensions_x.htm

approved
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-states-illegal-workers_x.htm

enact
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/opinion/l27arizona.html

enacted
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-states-illegal-workers_x.htm

 the state's highest court > New Jersey Supreme Court
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-25-gay-marriage_x.htm

California Supreme Court
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-05-15-calif-gay-marriage_N.htm

 Ohio’s incest law

lawmakers

Library of Congress > American Memory >
A Century of Lawmaking For a New Nation > U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html

Law Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/law/public/law.html

State lawmakers
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-25-gay-marriage_x.htm

New Jersey lawmakers
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-25-gay-marriage_x.htm

New York's state constitution
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-06-ny-gay-marriage_x.htm

Massachusetts > the Supreme Judicial Court
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-mass_x.htm

proposed constitutional amendment
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-mass_x.htm

be placed on the ballot, if approved by the Legislature
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-mass_x.htm

constitutional convention
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-mass_x.htm

legislation

proposed immigration and border security legislation
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-12-immigration-congress_x.htm

the Legislature / The state Legislature
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-10-mass_x.htm

legislature
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-09-minimum-wage_x.htm

at the Legislature

Georgia Legislature / Georgia General Assembly
http://www.legis.state.ga.us

Georgia House of Representatives
http://www.legis.state.ga.us/legis/2007_08/house/index.htm

Georgia State Senate
http://www.legis.state.ga.us/legis/2007_08/senate/index.htm

legislator

The Assembly speaker

session

 lame-duck session / assembly
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-30-congress-recess_x.htm

draw to an end

State house
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-21-wash-bill_x.htm

Congress

Senate

Senate panel
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-22-abramoff_x.htm

submit legislation to the United States Senate
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-24-lawyers-bush_x.htmb

Senate passes bill making it a crime to take a girl to another state for abortion        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-25-interstate-abortion_x.htm

the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court

Governor

sex offenders laws
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-23-sex-offenders_x.htm

President > sign into law a bill
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-26-bush-immigration_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-12-mass-health_x.htm

Legislature

vote

bill
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-09-terrorbill_x.htm

immigration bill        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-25-immigration_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-24-immigration_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-16-middle-ground-immigration_x.htm

mine safety bill        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-16-mine-safety_x.htm

approve the bill

pass a bill
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-25-immigration_x.htm

sign the bill

 state law

Rhode Island voting rights law        2006
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-felons-voting-rights_x.htm

ban

Supreme Court > Major rulings of the 2004-2005 Supreme Court team
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-06-29-gitmo-decision_x.htm

supreme court justice
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-04-02-court-guantanamo_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1699058,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/politics/politicsspecial1/31cnd-alito.html

a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-31-abortion-challenge_x.htm

declare the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-31-abortion-challenge_x.htm

senator

Lloyd Bentsen
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/raasch/2006-05-23-bentsen-appreciation_x.htm

Act

antiterror law > Patriot Act        2007

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled Wednesday
that using the act to authorize secret searches and wiretapping to gather criminal evidence
- instead of intelligence gathering - violates the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6952839,00.html

 

antiterror law > USA PATRIOT
Improvement and Reauthorization Act        2005
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/patriotact/
http://www.lifeandliberty.gov/index.html

antiterror law > Patriot Act        2001

HR 3162 RDS

107th CONGRESS
1st Session

H. R. 3162
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
October 24, 2001
Received
AN ACT
To deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world,
to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America
in Congress assembled
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.03162
http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html

extend
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-02-02-patriot-act_x.htm

felony
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-12-immigration-congress_x.htm

recess
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-30-congress-recess_x.htm

Justices Say Gun Rights Apply Locally

The New York Times
June 28, 2010
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly limit "the right to keep and bear arms," advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices signaled, however, that less severe restrictions could survive legal challenges.

Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right "applies equally to the federal government and the states."

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with a unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.

Monday's decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities "limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values."

    Justices Say Gun Rights Apply Locally, NYT, 28.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/28/us/AP-US-SupremeCourt-Guns.html

Rolling Back a Law Born of Enron

June 24, 2010
The New York Times
By FLOYD NORRIS

The timing is exquisite. First the Supreme Court of the United States provided a significant legal victory to the mastermind behind one of the greatest corporate frauds in American history. Next the court may throw out the law that Congress passed to reform corporate America — a law inspired by that very fraud.

The end of a Supreme Court term is often the most interesting. The cases that produced the biggest arguments are delayed until the last minute — and that minute is upon us.

The term ends next week. It is expected that the final rulings will appear on Monday. It is then that the court will decide whether to throw out the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

If it does, it will use the same basic argument it used Thursday. It will blame Congress for writing bad laws.

And that will clear the way for Congress, if it has the will, to swiftly rescue corporate reform and assure that future crooked corporate and government officials cannot take advantage of the rulings.

In one case decided Thursday, Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of the Enron fraud, persuaded the Supreme Court that the concept of committing fraud through depriving an employer of “honest services” was not adequately defined in the law.

If the executive took a bribe or a kickback, then that is illegal under the law, the justices concluded. But if he did something else equally outrageous, the law is too vague and is therefore unconstitutional.

For Mr. Skilling, the victory is only partial and could prove fleeting. The justices refused to order a new trial for him. There were other legal theories advanced by the government in charging Mr. Skilling with conspiracy to commit fraud, and the lower courts will now hear arguments over whether the verdict was amply justified by evidence supporting the other theories.

The high court was equally kind to another disgraced corporate executive. Using the Skilling case as a precedent, it threw into doubt the conviction of Conrad M. Black, the newspaper baron who controlled The Daily and Sunday Telegraph of London and The Chicago Sun-Times. The lower courts will consider whether other prosecution arguments can still justify the verdict.

The decision expected next week is nominally about the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and concerns an obscure constitutional clause regarding presidential powers. But it could lead to the entire Sarbanes-Oxley Act being thrown out.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed by Congress in 2002. The Enron scandal — in which it turned out that one of the largest companies in America had ridden roughshod over, under and through accounting rules to report billions in profits when it had no hope of paying its debts — got that effort started. The final push came when the WorldCom scandal broke.

Accounting firms had largely escaped any real regulation before, and the law created the board to inspect and regulate the firms. Board reports have forced major firms to change practices, and the board is generally viewed as having done a good job.

Under the law, the five members of the board are appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission but are legally not government employees. The board is financed by fees paid by publicly listed companies, and its budget is subject to approval by the S.E.C.

The argument before the court is that under the Constitution, Congress should have allowed the president — or someone he directly appoints and can remove at will — to make the appointments. That argument could well appeal to some justices, particularly Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has supported stronger executive power.

By itself, that dispute over appointment powers might not be too important. But in passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Congress did not put in a severability clause — a normal part of many laws saying that if part of the law is unconstitutional, the rest can stand on its own. So that has raised the prospect that the entire law would fall at the same time.

Out would go requirements for audits of corporate financial controls and for corporate executives to certify that their financial statements were accurate, among other things.

Just what Congress might do if that happened has become a subject of some speculation. Some corporate officials fear that in the current climate, Congress could enact new and tougher regulations. “It is conceivable that the re-proposed legislation would become a Christmas tree on which every ornament of corporate reform and governance will be hung,” said Susan Hackett, the general counsel of a trade group for corporate lawyers, the Association of Corporate Counsel.

But there are also signs that Congress is in no such mood. The financial reform bill that is expected to be passed seems likely to repeal the requirement for audited financial controls for most public companies, leaving it effective only for those with revenue above $75 million.

It also appears likely to grant corporate boards one of their greatest desires, by blocking planned S.E.C. rules aimed at permitting dissident shareholders from putting director candidates on the ballots sent to shareholders by the company. Instead, it would allow no such nominations unless the dissident owned at least 5 percent of the stock, a very high level.

In 2007, some of the same senators now supporting that provision, including Christopher J. Dodd, the Banking Committee chairman, argued that a 5 percent figure would gut any such rule.

It is interesting to consider why the court thinks it is Congress’s fault that it must rule as it did. The legal concepts at stake were largely based on judicial opinions beginning in the 1940s. The court blocked those opinions in 1987, saying that the law did not justify the “honest services” doctrine and inviting Congress to fix that.

Congress did just that in 1988. But now the justices say Congress did not define the doctrine very well. So it looked at the pre-1987 rulings and decided that they amply established that bribery and kickbacks were covered. But there was not enough consensus on other ways of violating that doctrine, like simple thievery. So Mr. Black and Mr. Skilling may walk. If Congress is unhappy, it can pass a better law.

If ever there was a corporate executive who viewed shareholders as inconvenient pests, it was Mr. Black. Eventually, after those shareholders complained over and over, a board committee advised by Richard C. Breeden, a former S.E.C. chairman, concluded that Mr. Black and his colleagues had been running a “corporate kleptocracy.” Facts the committee set out led to the Mr. Black’s conviction.

Mr. Black explained his concept of corporate governance in a 2002 e-mail message when he was under criticism from shareholders for excessive personal spending of corporate money:

“I’m not prepared to re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility. We have to find a balance between an unfair taxation on the company and a reasonable treatment of the founder-builders-managers. We are proprietors, after all, beleaguered though we may be.”

Thanks to the Supreme Court, he may soon feel less beleaguered. Next week, all of corporate America may feel the same way.

    Rolling Back a Law Born of Enron, NYT, 24.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/business/25norris.html

A Bruise on the First Amendment

June 21, 2010
The New York Times

Forty-three years ago, when the nation lived in fear of Communist sympathizers and saboteurs, the Supreme Court said that even the need for national defense could not reduce the First Amendment rights of those associating with American Communists.

On Monday, in the first case since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to test free speech against the demands of national security in the age of terrorism, the ideals of an earlier time were eroded and free speech lost. By preserving an extremely vague prohibition on aiding and associating with terrorist groups, the court reduced the First Amendment rights of American citizens.

The case was not about sending money to terrorist organizations or serving as their liaison, activities that are clearly and properly illegal. And it did not stop people from simply saying they support the goals of groups like Hamas or Al Qaeda, as long as they are not actually working with those groups. But it could have a serious impact on lawyers, journalists or academics who represent or study terrorist groups.

The case arose after an American human rights group, the Humanitarian Law Project, challenged the law prohibiting “material support” to terror groups, which was defined in the 2001 Patriot Act to include “expert advice or assistance.” The law project wanted to provide advice to two terrorist groups on how to peacefully resolve their disputes and work with the United Nations. The two groups — the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — have violent histories and their presence on the State Department’s official list of terrorist groups is not in dispute.

But though the law project was actually trying to reduce the violence of the two groups, the court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. on behalf of five other justices, said that did not matter and ruled the project’s efforts illegal. Even peaceful assistance to a terror group can further terrorism, the chief justice wrote, in part by lending them legitimacy and allowing them to pretend to be negotiating while plotting violence.

In a powerful dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, also speaking for Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, swept away those arguments. If providing legitimacy to a terror group was really a crime, he wrote, then it should also be a crime to independently legitimize a terror group through speech, which it is not. Never before, he said, had the court criminalized a form of speech on these kinds of grounds, noting with particular derision the notion that peaceful assistance buys negotiating time for an opponent to achieve bad ends.

The court at least clarified that acts had to be coordinated with terror groups to be illegal, but many forms of assistance may still be a criminal act, including filing a brief against the government in a terror-group lawsuit. Academic researchers doing field work in conflict zones could be arrested for meeting with terror groups and discussing their research, as could journalists who write about the activities and motivations of these groups, or the journalists’ sources. The F.B.I. has questioned people it suspected as being sources for a New York Times article about terrorism, and threatened to arrest them for providing material support.

There remains a reasonable way of resolving these disputes. Justice Breyer proposed a standard that would criminalize this kind of speech or association “only when the defendant knows or intends that those activities will assist the organization’s unlawful terrorist actions.” Because he was unable to persuade a majority on the court, Congress needs to enact this standard into law.

    A Bruise on the First Amendment, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22tue1.html

Editorial

The Court’s Blow to Democracy

January 22, 2010
The New York Times

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.

The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)

The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections — the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.

In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.

This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.

The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.

The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.

After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.

Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.

These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy.

    The Court’s Blow to Democracy, NYT, 22.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html

D.C. Sniper Is to Be Executed on Tuesday

November 10, 2009
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to block the execution of John A. Muhammad, the sniper who terrorized the Washington area seven years ago. The step cleared the way for Mr. Muhammad to be put to death on Tuesday unless Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia intervenes.

The court did not comment in refusing to hear Mr. Muhammad’s appeal, but three justices objected to the relative haste accompanying the execution.

Justice John Paul Stevens complained that “under our normal practice,” Mr. Muhammad’s petition for the court to take his case would have been discussed at the justices’ conference scheduled for Nov. 24. But because Virginia scheduled the execution for Tuesday, the judicial process was rushed, Justice Stevens said in a statement joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Stevens wrote that, having reviewed Mr. Muhammad’s argument, he did not disagree with the majority’s decision to decline the case. Nevertheless, he said, because the court declined to stay the execution, “we have allowed Virginia to truncate our deliberative process on a matter — involving a death row inmate — that demands the most careful attention.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., upheld the death sentence three months ago. In rejecting Mr. Muhammad’s appeal, that federal panel said it was “unable to find reversible error in the conclusions of the state and district courts.”

Unless Mr. Kaine stops the execution, Mr. Muhammad, 48, will be given a lethal injection on Tuesday night for the killing of Dean H. Meyers, an engineer who was shot in the head at a gas station in Manassas, Va.

Mr. Meyers was one of 10 people killed in Maryland, Virginia and Washington over three weeks in October 2002. Mr. Muhammad’s accomplice, Lee B. Malvo, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The two are also suspected of fatal shootings in Alabama, Arizona and Louisiana.

Mr. Kaine has promised to review Mr. Muhammad’s request but has signaled that he is not inclined to intervene.

The governor has said he is personally opposed to the death penalty, but he has allowed a number of executions to take place since he took office in 2006. Virginia has the nation’s second-busiest death chamber, behind Texas.

The jurors who convicted Mr. Muhammad in November 2003 cited the defendant’s apparent lack of remorse in deciding to impose the death penalty.

    D.C. Sniper Is to Be Executed on Tuesday, NYT, 10.11.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/us/10sniper.html

The Practice

September 27, 2009
The New York Times
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ

LOUIS D. BRANDEIS

A Life

By Melvin I. Urofsky

Illustrated. 953 pp. Pantheon Books. $40

The popular parlor game of ranking our presidents hasn’t caught on for Supreme Court justices, perhaps because there are too many of them (Sonia Sotomayor is the 111th justice) or because Americans have so little knowledge of what they actually do. But if justices were to be ranked, three names would appear on the top of most lists: Chief Justice John Marshall, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Louis D. Brandeis. Similarly, if practicing lawyers were to be ranked, nearly every list would include John Adams, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow and Brandeis.

Notably, the only person on both lists is Brandeis. He would also be included on a list of America’s most important social reformers and innovators, having developed savings bank life insurance and new ways of practicing law. He was the co-author of what may well be the single most influential law review article in history — on the right to privacy. And he was the most significant American in helping to establish the state of Israel. All in all, this son of Czech-Jewish immigrants, who grew up in Louisville, Ky., may well qualify as the greatest legal personage in American history.

Melvin I. Urofsky — the author of this monumental, authoritative and appreciative biography of the man Franklin D. Roosevelt called “Isaiah” — would surely agree. A professor of law and public policy at Virginia Commonwealth University, Urofsky has devoted much of his career to documenting the personal and professional life of the great lawyer and justice. In “Louis D. Brandeis: A Life,” he demonstrates, deploying a Brandeisian array of factual material, why Brandeis still matters, nearly 70 years after his death. The First Amendment’s right of free expression, the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy and the due process clause’s focus on personal liberty (rather than property) all owe their current vitality to the creative genius of Justice Brandeis, whose dissenting opinions have become the law of the land.

Today, Brandeis is seen by liberals as their patron saint because of his views on speech, privacy, liberty and social welfare, yet conservatives claim him as well, because of his commitment to judicial restraint. In many ways he defies labeling. He demonstrated through his judicial decisions that a living constitution, responsive to changing needs, is not incompatible with a modest view of the role of judges. He rejected judicial activism in favor of allowing legislatures — the voice of the people — to expand rights and extend protections to the most vulnerable. He said of the Supreme Court that “the most important thing we do is not doing.”

This was, of course, easier to say in his day, when legislatures, for the most part, were more progressive than courts. He led the Supreme Court in upholding progressive (some called it radical) legislative innovations in the areas of labor law, protection of women and fairness to the poor. But unlike many of today’s justices, who employ artificial jurisprudential constructs to further (and disguise) their political or religious ideologies, Brandeis was a judge who placed principle over politics, and who often voted to uphold legislation he personally despised, like the “big government” aspects of the New Deal. For the most part, however, the laws he upheld were of the sort he, as “the people’s attorney,” helped to design and defend.

Indeed, he developed the legal technique — called “the Brandeis brief” — that was used by progressive lawyers to support legislation in the face of constitutional challenges, especially those based on the property rights of corporations. The Brandeis brief, which has become commonplace today, not only presents the court with an analysis of legal precedents but also marshals current factual material — statistics, scientific experiments, governmental records — to demonstrate that the legislature had a reasonable basis for its actions. It is difficult to overstate the revolutionary consequences of this tactic. Before the introduction of the Brandeis brief, the law was seen by conservatives as a formal series of rules representing eternal verities, unchangeable by new circumstances. Brandeis presented a direct challenge to the old regime by demanding that the law be responsive to new realities, based on new facts.

Urofsky acknowledges that Brandeis did not invent out of whole cloth his fact-based approach to the law. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in particular, had argued that the life of the law was “experience” rather than “logic.” And experience is, of course, fact based.

Brandeis was also the heir of Jefferson and Madison, who saw ­freedom of ­expression as the foundation of ­democracy. But unlike Holmes, Jefferson and ­Madison, Brandeis was a great legal practitioner who knew how to turn theory into practice. He created enduring ­struc­tures that lawyers could use to implement the ideas propounded by Jefferson, Madison and Holmes.

The impact he had on the practice of law when he himself practiced it, lucratively and effectively for over 35 years, was probably as great as the impact he had as a justice of the Supreme Court. He is one of the handful of justices — along with Thurgood Marshall, Benjamin Cardozo, William Howard Taft, Earl Warren and Arthur Goldberg — who would have been remembered by history even if he had never been elevated to the high court. (Today’s court has no one with Brandeis’s experience as a practicing lawyer — and it shows.) Remarkably, it was his innovative work as an attorney that, along with his religion, almost kept him from being confirmed by the Senate when President Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the court in 1916. Urofsky believes that his religion played less of a role than his radical approach to the law, but it is impossible to separate the two, because the bigotry of the day associated his alleged radicalism with his Jewish heritage.

One of Urofsky’s most fascinating revelations deals with Brandeis’s conversion from a Christmas-celebrating secular American of Jewish heritage to a committed Zionist and Jew. According to Urofsky, there was no single “aha” moment of revelation. Rather, Brandeis was convinced that Zionism was an outgrowth of his progressive values. The idea of Jews’ having a homeland, based on social justice and Jewish prophetic principles, seemed entirely natural to him. He poured his heart, soul, fortune and considerable energies into persuading American Jews, who were generally unsympathetic to European Zionism, that one could be a patriotic American while at the same time advocating a Jewish homeland for the oppressed Jews of Europe. His most important contribution to Israel’s establishment was in turning Zionism from a theory alien to many American Jews into a pragmatic program to rid the Holy Land of disease, to increase its agricultural production and to make it feasible for European Jews to live in peace with their Arab neighbors. There are many who believe that without Brandeis’s advocacy, the United States would not have supported the establishment of Israel.

Although this is an admiring biography, it is far from hagiographic. Urofsky presents the warts, few as there were. Brandeis’s approach to the practice of law in which he sometimes served as “counsel to the situation” — representing both parties to a dispute in an effort to achieve a just result — raised legitimate questions, as did his payments to his acolyte Felix Frankfurter when Brandeis was a justice and Frankfurter a Harvard Law professor who was promoting causes dear to both of them. But on balance, Urofsky’s Brandeis brief in support of “Isaiah’s” important place in the annals of the law and history is convincing.

 

Alan M. Dershowitz’s most recent book is “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza.”

    The Practice, NYT, 27.9.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/books/review/Dershowitz-t.html

Editorial

12 and in Prison

July 28, 2009
The New York Times

The Supreme Court sent an important message when it ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that children under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed were not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults.

The states have followed this logic in death penalty cases. But they have continued to mete out barbaric treatment — including life sentences — to children whose cases should rightly be handled through the juvenile courts.

Congress can help to correct these practices by amending the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, which is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. To get a share of delinquency prevention money, the law requires the states and localities to meet minimum federal protections for youths in the justice system. These protections are intended to keep as many youths as possible out of adult jails and prisons, and to segregate those that are sent to those places from the adult criminal population.

The case for tougher legislative action is laid out in an alarming new study of children 13 and under in the adult criminal justice system, the lead author of which is the juvenile justice scholar, Michele Deitch, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the study, every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults, and more than 20 states permit preadolescent children as young as 7 to be tried in adult courts.

This is terrible public policy. Children who are convicted and sentenced as adults are much more likely to become violent offenders — and to return to an adult jail later on — than children tried in the juvenile justice system.

Despite these well-known risks, policy makers across the country do not have reliable data on just how many children are being shunted into the adult system by state statutes or prosecutors, who have the discretion to file cases in the adult courts.

But there is reasonably reliable data showing juvenile court judges send about 80 children ages 13 and under into the adult courts each year. These statistics explode the myth that those children have committed especially heinous acts.

The data suggest, for example, that children 13 and under who commit crimes like burglary and theft are just as likely to be sent to adult courts as children who commit serious acts of violence against people. As has been shown in previous studies, minority defendants are more likely to get adult treatment than their white counterparts who commit comparable offenses.

The study’s authors rightly call on lawmakers to enact laws that discourage harsh sentencing for preadolescent children and that enable them to be transferred back into the juvenile system. Beyond that, Congress should amend the juvenile justice act to require the states to simply end these inhumane practices to be eligible for federal juvenile justice funds.

    12 and in Prison, NYT, 28.7.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opinion/28tue1.html?hpw

Op-Ed Contributor

The Day Obscenity Became Art

July 21, 2009
The New York Times
By FRED KAPLAN

TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech — and also, in retrospect, splashing cold water on the idea, much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, that judges are “umpires” rather than agents of social change.

The historic case began on May 15, 1959, when Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, sued the Post Office for confiscating copies of the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had long been banned for its graphic sex scenes.

Most lawyers of the time would have advised Mr. Rosset that he had a weak case. Back in 1873, Anthony Comstock, the former postal inspector who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had persuaded Congress to pass a law outlawing obscenity, which state and federal courts came to define over the decades as works that “community standards” would regard as “lustful,” “lewd,” “lascivious” or “prurient.”

As recently as 1957, the Supreme Court had ruled in Roth v. United States — a case involving a bookseller who sent erotic literature through the mail — that the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech did not apply to obscenity. The case against “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” seemed cut and dry; whatever the book’s literary merits, it met the legal definition of obscenity.

However, Mr. Rosset hired a lawyer named Charles Rembar, whom he’d met playing tennis in the Hamptons. Rembar had never argued a case in court but was an adviser to several writers, including his cousin Norman Mailer. (When Mailer wrote “The Naked and the Dead,” his career-sparking World War II novel, Rembar advised him to avoid legal controversy by spelling his characters’ most common utterance “fug.” The trick worked.)

Looking over the Roth decision, Rembar spotted a loophole. The opinion, written by Justice William J. Brennan, noted that the First Amendment’s purpose was “to assure unfettered interchange of ideas” and that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guarantees.” But, Brennan went on, “implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.”

Rembar mulled over a question that Brennan apparently hadn’t considered: What if a book met the standards of obscenity yet also presented ideas of “redeeming social importance”? By Brennan’s logic, wouldn’t it qualify for the First Amendment’s protection after all?

On a sheet of paper, Rembar drew two slightly overlapping circles. He labeled one circle “Material appealing to prurient interests.” He labeled the other “Material utterly without social importance.” By Brennan’s reasoning, only material that fell inside both circles — that was both prurient and worthless — should be denied the privileges of free speech.

This was the argument that Rembar made before Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. With the assistance of several literary critics’ testimony, he presented “Lady Chatterley” as a novel of ideas that inveighed against sex without love, the mechanization of industrial life and morbid hypocrisy.

The United States attorney representing the Post Office, S. Hazard Gillespie Jr., thought Rembar had misread the law, and he recited a clause of the Roth ruling that Rembar had omitted. Justice Brennan had written that controversial ideas “have the full protection” of the First Amendment — “unless,” Gillespie underlined, these ideas were “excludable because they encroach upon the limited area of more important interests.” One of those interests, surely, was keeping obscenity under wraps. Hence Rembar’s argument was irrelevant.

This was, however, just the rebuttal Rembar was hoping for. He pointed out a footnote in which Brennan elaborated on what kind of “more important interests” were “excludable.” All of them involved actions — peddling, picketing, parading without a license, playing loud music from a truck. The First Amendment didn’t protect any of that. But none of Brennan’s examples involved writing — expression unattached to conduct. Pure expression could be forbidden, Rembar argued, only if it was “utterly without social importance.”

On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority — which, until then, it held absolutely — to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.

The Post Office did appeal Judge Bryan’s verdict; a panel of four judges upheld it unanimously. The government’s lawyers decided not to appeal further to the Supreme Court. They knew that they would lose — that the justices who, just two years earlier, had excluded this sort of literature from constitutional protection would now change their minds. They knew that Rembar’s creative view of Justice Brennan’s opinion — a view that Brennan had not explicitly considered when he wrote it — was logically unassailable.

The case also made clear that laws are more complex than strike zones or foul lines, which is why the analogy between judges and umpires is so misleading.

The distinction is sharpened by another argument Rembar made during the “Lady Chatterley” trial. “A novel, no matter how much devoted to the act of sex,” he said, “can hardly add to the constant sexual prodding with which our environment assails us.” In the mass media of the day, with its appeals to a booming youth market, movies and advertisements were often “calculated to produce sexual thoughts and reactions,” to the point where “we live in a sea of sexual provocation.”

In short, “community standards” were radically changing. The proof was that, after the ban on “Lady Chatterley” was lifted, the book reached the No. 2 slot on The New York Times best-seller list (topped only by Leon Uris’s “Exodus”) and, within a year, sold two million copies.

For many decades, the courts upheld racial segregation; then, suddenly, they didn’t. For many decades, the courts let the Post Office decide which books people could read; then, suddenly, they didn’t. In both cases, and many others that could be cited, the laws hadn’t changed; society did. And the courts responded accordingly.

 

Fred Kaplan is a columnist for Slate and the author of “1959: The Year Everything Changed.”

    The Day Obscenity Became Art, NYT, 21.7.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/opinion/21kaplan.html

Sidebar

Free-Speech Case for a Debt-Ridden Age

June 23, 2009
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON

The great Supreme Court free-speech cases of the 20th century arose from the suppression of political dissent in wartime and the struggle for civil rights in the South. These days, the court’s First Amendment docket is thinner and odder.

A recent sample: Minor celebrities swearing. Dog fight videos. A monument to the Seven Aphorisms of the Summum religion. A banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

But the Supreme Court did just agree to hear a free-speech case that captures the tenor of our times. It concerns bankruptcy.

One of the plaintiffs in the case is Robert J. Milavetz, a 73-year-old lawyer from Minnesota. In the 1960s and 1970s, he represented conscientious objectors and people accused of violating obscenity laws. The new free-speech battleground, he says, is whether the government can gag lawyers seeking to help their clients arrange their financial affairs.

In 2005, Congress enacted a law that seems to bar lawyers from advising their clients to take on more debt if they are considering bankruptcy.

“Any lawyer with a First Amendment background would immediately recognize the First Amendment problems in this statute,” Mr. Milavetz said.

The law was meant to combat what it called bankruptcy abuses. It is certainly possible to abuse the bankruptcy system by piling on debt right before filing in the hope that you will not have to repay it. But ethics rules already forbid lawyers from advising their clients to break the law.

At the same time, not all new debt in the face of bankruptcy is abusive. It may be perfectly legal and prudent, for instance, to refinance a home mortgage to pay down credit card debt. It may make sense to buy a car on credit to make sure you can get to work — so you can pay back your creditors. But the law seems to forbid lawyers from suggesting or even discussing such things.

Joseph R. Prochaska, a bankruptcy lawyer in Nashville who represents creditors, said a client might get plausible advice from, say, a brother-in-law or from Suze Orman on CNBC about refinancing a loan.

“You go to your lawyer for confirmation,” Mr. Prochaska continued. “As a lawyer, what do you say to that — if I told you to do that, I’d be breaking the law.”

Experts in First Amendment law and legal ethics said the law, at least if read broadly, is deeply flawed.

“To say that a lawyer can’t advise a client to take on legal debt is clearly unconstitutional,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the new law school at the University of California, Irvine.

Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal ethics at New York University, agreed. “Congress has no legitimate interest in denying people knowledge of their lawful alternatives,” Professor Gillers said.

In its brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the government did not defend the broader and more natural reading of the law, the one that would forbid even lawful advice. Instead, it said the law contained “a term of art” with “a specialized meaning” that should allow for a more limited reading, one that applies only to abusive situations.

The law forbids advising someone “to incur more debt in contemplation of such person filing” for bankruptcy. The term of art, the government says, is the three-word phrase “in contemplation of.” You probably have to be a very good lawyer to make that phrase mean what the government says it means: “actions taken with the intent to abuse the protections of the bankruptcy system.”

In fairness, the government’s interpretation won support from a dissenting appeals court judge in the case the Supreme Court agreed to hear, from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, and from a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans.

To avoid holding a law unconstitutional, the Fifth Circuit said, it is sometimes a good idea to give a “restrictive meaning” to “what appear to be plain words.” That approach has a name: the doctrine of constitutional avoidance.

Mr. Milavetz’s firm challenged the law, asking that it be struck down in all possible applications. Its briefs discuss hypothetical problems. The law prohibits advice about co-signing on a child’s student loan, one brief said, or borrowing to pay for credit counseling.

But the Supreme Court has not welcomed these kinds of sweeping challenges in recent cases, preferring more focused “as applied” cases that take issue with particular applications of laws.

The law also requires bankruptcy lawyers covered by it to publish disclosures when they advertise. The law says they must use this statement or something “substantially similar”: “We are a debt relief agency. We help people file for bankruptcy relief under the Bankruptcy Code.”

Mr. Milavetz said the language was aimed to stifle speech. “I feel the term ‘debt relief agency’ is pejorative,” he said. “It deters lawyers from advertising.”

Other lawyers welcome the requirement.

“Most consumer bankruptcy lawyers like to call themselves a ‘debt relief agency,’ ” Mr. Prochaska said. “They have buttons that say ‘Federal Debt Relief Agent.’ It’s a marketing tool.”

There are traces of history in every era’s First Amendment cases. These days, it seems, the great open question is what may be said in the face of looming financial ruin.

    Free-Speech Case for a Debt-Ridden Age, NYT, 23.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23bar.html

Justices Reject Inmate Right to DNA Tests

June 19, 2009
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The court divided along familiar ideological lines, with the majority emphasizing that 46 states already have laws that allow at least some prisoners to gain access to DNA evidence.

“To suddenly constitutionalize this area,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority, “would short-circuit what looks to be a prompt and considered legislative response.”

The case before the court concerned Alaska, which has no DNA testing law. Prosecutors there have conceded that such testing could categorically establish the guilt or innocence of William G. Osborne, who was convicted in 1994 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a prostitute in Anchorage.

In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the Constitution’s due process clause required allowing Mr. Osborne to have access to DNA evidence in his case.

“For reasons the state has been unable or unwilling to articulate,” Justice Stevens wrote, “it refuses to allow Osborne to test the evidence at his own expense and to thereby ascertain the truth once and for all.”

Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged the “unparalleled ability” of DNA testing “both to exonerate the wrongly convicted and to identify the guilty.” Such testing has played a role in 240 exonerations, according to the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, which represents Mr. Osborne. In 103 of those cases, the testing also identified the actual perpetrator.

Peter Neufeld, a director of the project, said Thursday’s decision would have pernicious consequences.

“It’s unquestionable that some people in some states who are factually innocent will not get DNA testing and will languish in prison,” Mr. Neufeld said. “Some of them will die in prison.”

Only four states — Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts and Oklahoma — do not have laws in place specifically dealing with postconviction DNA testing, and Alabama recently enacted one limited to death row inmates that will become effective soon.

Many states that do allow postconviction testing impose conditions on who may seek it. Prosecutors often fight hard to deny access to DNA evidence even in states that nominally allow it, saying the prisoner in question had not met the statutory conditions.

Some laws, for instance, do not allow prisoners who have confessed to seek DNA evidence, though false confessions have been common among exonerated inmates. Other states allow testing only if it was unavailable at the time of trial.

Mr. Neufeld said the logic of Thursday’s decision might allow constitutional challenges to some of those laws.

In the case from Alaska, District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, No. 08-6, Mr. Osborne sought to test biological evidence on a condom found at the crime scene, a snowbank near Anchorage International Airport. The victim was raped, beaten with an ax handle, shot in the head and left for dead. But the bullet only grazed her head, and she survived.

Rudimentary DNA testing on the condom in preparation for trial excluded two other suspects and included Mr. Osborne among those who might have committed the crime. The kind of testing used at the time, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “generally cannot narrow the perpetrator down to less than 5 percent of the population.”

Mr. Osborne’s trial lawyer decided not to pursue a second kind of DNA testing that was more discriminating. The lawyer said she feared that the results might further incriminate her client. After his conviction, Mr. Osborne sued state officials in federal court seeking access to the DNA evidence for a third kind of yet-more-discriminating testing.

There was other significant evidence of Mr. Osborne’s guilt, and he confessed to the Alaska Board of Parole, which released him after 14 years. He later said he had lied to the parole board in the hope of quicker release. Mr. Osborne has since been convicted of a home invasion.

Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ordered prosecutors in Alaska to turn over the DNA evidence, saying the most sophisticated form of testing had not been available at the time of the trial, that Mr. Osborne would bear its cost and that the results could provide a conclusive answer about his guilt or innocence.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a part of his concurrence joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, was skeptical of all of the appeals court’s rationales.

Allowing Mr. Osborne to forgo testing at trial and then request it from prison, Justice Alito wrote, “would allow prisoners to play games with the criminal justice system.”

“After conviction,” Justice Alito added, “with nothing to lose, the defendant could demand DNA testing in the hope that some happy accident — for example, degradation or contamination of the evidence — would provide the basis for seeking postconviction relief.”

Justice Alito acknowledged that the testing Mr. Osborne now seeks was more advanced than the kind his lawyer failed to pursue.

“But his counsel did not decline” the less discriminating testing “because she thought it was not good enough,” Justice Alito wrote. “She declined because she thought it was too good.”

States would incur significant costs, Justice Alito added, were prisoners “given a never-before-recognized constitutional right to rummage through the state’s genetic-evidence locker.” And even the most sophisticated DNA testing, he said, “often fails to provide absolute proof of anything.”

Although it has no DNA testing law, Alaska does have general procedures through which prisoners can try to gain access to evidence that might prove their innocence. The justices disagreed about how effective those procedures have been.

Chief Justice Roberts, whose majority opinion was joined by Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Alito and Antonin Scalia, wrote that he saw “nothing inadequate” about the procedures.

But Justice Stevens said no prisoner had ever obtained DNA evidence for testing in Alaska. He said Mr. Osborne “was rebuffed at every turn” by the state, creating “grave doubts about the adequacy of the procedural protections” in state law.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer joined all of Justice Stevens’s opinion and Justice David H. Souter part of it.

Justice Souter issued a dissent saying that officials in Alaska had “demonstrated a combination of inattentiveness and intransigence” that add up to “procedural unfairness that violates the due process clause.”

But Chief Justice Roberts concluded that the issue of when to allow DNA testing was best handled by the states.

“The question,” he wrote, “ is whether further change will primarily be made by legislative revision and judicial interpretation of the existing system, or whether the federal judiciary must leap ahead — revising (or even discarding) the system by creating a new constitutional right and taking over responsibility for refining it.”

    Justices Reject Inmate Right to DNA Tests, NYT, 19.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/19scotus.html?hpw

Gun Rulings Open Way to Supreme Court Review

June 17, 2009
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A year ago, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark decision establishing the constitutional right of Americans to own guns. But the justices did not explain what the practical effect of that ruling would be on city and state gun laws.

Could a city still ban handguns? The justices said the District of Columbia could not, but only because it is a special federal district. The question of the constitutionality of existing city and state gun laws was left unanswered.

That left a large vacuum for the lower courts to fill. Supporters of gun rights filed a flurry of lawsuits to strike down local gun restrictions, and now federal appeals courts have begun weighing in on this divisive issue, using very different reasoning.

One court this month upheld Chicago’s ban on automatic weapons and concealed handguns, while in April a California court disagreed on the constitutional issue.

The differing opinions mean that the whole issue of city and state gun laws will probably head back to the Supreme Court for clarification, leading many legal experts to predict a further expansion of gun rights.

The new cases are fallout from last year’s Supreme Court case, District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down parts of Washington’s gun control ordinance, the strictest in the country, and stated for the first time that the Second Amendment gives individuals a right to keep and bear arms for personal use. But the court declined to say whether the Second Amendment in general applies to state and local governments.

In January, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, in a ruling joined by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, declined to apply the Second Amendment to a New York law that banned the martial arts device known as chukka sticks. The ban was allowed to stay in place.

Then in April, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that the Second Amendment did apply to the states, even though it allowed a California county to ban guns on government property like state fairgrounds. That case, Nordyke v. King, is being considered for a rehearing by the full Ninth Circuit.

Those two conflicting cases set the stage for two other cases that were heard as one in the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, testing that city’s handgun ban. On June 2, a three-judge panel of the court, led by Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, a well-known conservative, ruled that there was no basis for the court to apply the Second Amendment to the states. Such a decision, Judge Easterbrook wrote, should be made only by the Supreme Court, not at the appellate level.

The right of states to make their own decisions on such matters, Judge Easterbrook wrote, “is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right to carry any particular kind of weapon.”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs, including the National Rifle Association, have asked the Supreme Court to take up the Chicago cases.

A split among the federal appeals circuits, especially on constitutional issues, invites Supreme Court action, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Californians, Hawaiians and Oregonians have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but New Yorkers, Illinoisans, and Wisconsinites don’t,” Professor Winkler said. “The Supreme Court will want to correct this sooner rather than later.”

The process of applying amendments of the Bill of Rights to the states, known as incorporation, began after the Civil War but had its heyday in the activist Supreme Court of the Earl Warren era. Much of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and some rights of criminal defendants, have been applied to the states, but other elements have not, including the Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial and the Second Amendment.

Incorporation fell out of favor after the 1960s, but a new generation of largely liberal scholars of law and history have brought it back into the intellectual mainstream, said Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale University, who supports the process.

“The precedents are now supportive of incorporation of nearly every provision of the Bill of Rights,” Professor Amar said. “Now what’s odd is that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to the states.”

Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, said he would be surprised if the Supreme Court accepted these gun cases, because some of the conservative justices on the court had scoffed at incorporation arguments in the past and might not want to set a precedent.

Professor Amar, however, argued that the justices would not only take up the case but would also ultimately vote for incorporation of the Second Amendment.

Even if the Second Amendment becomes the controlling law of every state and town, constitutional scholars say it is still unlikely that gun laws would be overturned wholesale. The Supreme Court’s Heller decision last year, notes Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University, “clearly indicates that governments will still have wide latitude to regulate firearms.”

Even the Ninth Circuit in California, while applying the Second Amendment to the states, still upheld the gun ordinance that gave rise to the lawsuit.

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the view of the Ninth Circuit reflected what polls have said was, by and large, the view of the American people.

“There is a right to bear arms,” Professor Volokh said, “but it’s not absolute.”

    Gun Rulings Open Way to Supreme Court Review, NYT, 17.6.2009,http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17guns.html?hp

Op-Ed Contributor

Death Penalty Disgrace

June 1, 2009
The New York Times
By BOB BARR

THERE is no abuse of government power more egregious than executing an innocent man. But that is exactly what may happen if the United States Supreme Court fails to intervene on behalf of Troy Davis.

Mr. Davis is facing execution for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Ga., even though seven of the nine witnesses have recanted their testimony against him. Many of these witnesses now say they were pressured into testifying falsely against him by police officers who were understandably eager to convict someone for killing a comrade. No court has ever heard the evidence of Mr. Davis’s innocence.

After the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit barred Mr. Davis from raising his claims of innocence, his attorneys last month petitioned the Supreme Court for an original writ of habeas corpus. This would be an extraordinary procedure — provided for by the Constitution but granted only a handful of times since 1900. However, absent this, Mr. Davis faces an extraordinary and obviously final injustice.

This threat of injustice has come about because the lower courts have misread the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law I helped write when I was in Congress. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, I wanted to stop the unfounded and abusive delays in capital cases that tend to undermine our criminal justice system.

With the effective death penalty act, Congress limited the number of habeas corpus petitions that a defendant could file, and set a time after which those petitions could no longer be filed. But nothing in the statute should have left the courts with the impression that they were barred from hearing claims of actual innocence like Troy Davis’s.

It would seem in everyone’s interest to find out as best we can what really happened that night 20 years ago in a dim parking lot where Officer Mark MacPhail was shot dead. With no murder weapon, surveillance videotape or DNA evidence left behind, the jury that judged Mr. Davis had to weigh the conflicting testimony of several eyewitnesses to sift out the gunman from the onlookers who had nothing to do with the heinous crime.

A litany of affidavits from prosecution witnesses now tell of an investigation that was focused not on scrutinizing all suspects, but on building a case against Mr. Davis. One witness, for instance, has said she testified against Mr. Davis because she was on parole and was afraid the police would send her back to prison if she did not cooperate.

So far, the federal courts have said it is enough that the state courts reviewed the affidavits of the witnesses who recanted their testimony. This reasoning is misplaced in a capital case. Reading an affidavit is a far cry from seeing a witness testify in open court.

Because Mr. Davis’s claim of innocence has never been heard in a court, the Supreme Court should remand his case to a federal district court and order an evidentiary hearing. (I was among those who signed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Davis.) Only a hearing where witnesses are subject to cross-examination will put this case to rest.

Although the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution last fall, the court declined to review the case itself, and its intervention still has not provided an opportunity for Mr. Davis to have a hearing on new evidence. This has become a matter of no small urgency: Georgia could set an execution date at any time.

I am a firm believer in the death penalty, but I am an equally firm believer in the rights and protections guaranteed by the Constitution. To execute Troy Davis without having a court hear the evidence of his innocence would be unconscionable and unconstitutional.
 

Bob Barr served in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.

    Death Penalty Disgrace, NYT, 31.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/opinion/01barr.html

Editorial

The New Justice

May 27, 2009
The New York Times

President Obama seems to have made an inspired choice in picking Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. She has an impressive judicial record, a stellar academic background and a compelling life story. Judge Sotomayor would also be a trailblazing figure in the mold of Thurgood Marshall, becoming the first member of the nation’s large and growing but still under-represented Hispanic population to serve on the court.

Based on what we know now, the Senate should confirm her so she can join the court when it begins its new term in October.

It’s impossible not to be moved by Judge Sotomayor’s story — born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents and brought up in a city housing project. She was found to have diabetes as a child, and her father, a factory worker, died when she was 9, leaving her mother, a nurse, to raise her and her brother. Judge Sotomayor attended Princeton, from which she graduated summa cum laude, and Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the law review.

Her legal experience is impressive and wide-ranging. She spent five years as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and was a partner in a commercial litigation firm. She has been a federal judge for 16 years, serving on both a district court, where she presided over trials, and an appellate court. As a member of the New York-based United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she is known for being smart, extraordinarily well prepared and deeply engaged.

In her rulings, Judge Sotomayor has repeatedly displayed the empathy Mr. Obama has said he is looking for in a justice. She has listened attentively to, and often ruled in favor of, people who have been discriminated against, defendants and other groups that are increasingly getting short shrift in the federal courts. She has shown little patience for the sort of procedural bars that conservative judges have been using to close the courthouse door on people whose rights have been violated.

Conservative activists have already begun trying to paint Judge Sotomayor as a liberal ideologue, but her carefully reasoned, fact-based decisions indicate otherwise. In many ways, her approach to the law is similar to that of Justice David Souter, whose seat she would take.

The Senate will have to carefully scrutinize Judge Sotomayor’s record on and off the bench, as it must for anyone seeking to join the court. If no big surprises turn up, it is not clear that Senate Republicans will expend much effort trying to block this nomination. Apart from her qualifications, they may decide that in light of their desire to win over Latino voters — and their low chance of winning a confirmation battle, given the Democrats’ big Senate majority — it is not worth the fight.

If Judge Sotomayor joins the court, it will be a special point of pride for Hispanic-Americans — as it was for Jews, blacks and women before them to see one of their own take a seat on the highest tribunal in the land. It will also bring the paltry number of female justices back to two. And as Democratic Party strategists have no doubt calculated, the selection could give Mr. Obama and his party a boost with a key voting group.

Judge Sotomayor, though, is more than just a distinguished member of two underrepresented groups. She is an accomplished lawyer and judge, who could become an extraordinary Supreme Court justice.

    The New Justice, NYT, 27.5.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/opinion/27wed1.html

The Nation

2,691 Decisions

July 13, 2008
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON — Sometime during the first of my nearly 30 years reporting on the Supreme Court, a distinct visual image of a Supreme Court term took hold in my mind and never let go. The nine-month term was a mountain. My job was to climb it.

The slope was gentle when the term began, every first Monday in October; the court was busy choosing new cases and hearing arguments, but it was not yet ready to issue decisions. The upward path steepened in January and February, when grants of new cases, arguments and decisions all came at once, competing for attention. Spring brought a breather as the path flattened out again: all the arguments had been heard, and the decisions were sporadic. The steepest climb came, predictably, every June, with the final outpouring of opinions before the summer recess. And then it was over. I could look down from the mountaintop to see the term whole and clear, while off in the distance the next term loomed, another climb.

But not this year. I am retiring from The New York Times to write and teach at Yale Law School. So this time, I can survey all the mountains, stretching back to the morning in 1978 when I first walked up the court’s marble steps — mistakenly, as it turned out, because people with business at the court actually use a less majestic but more practical side entrance at ground level.

I had been a political reporter, covering state government in New York from Albany, before I received a Ford Foundation fellowship for journalists to attend Yale Law School for a year. Certainly my Yale master’s degree, the ink barely dry as I walked up those marble steps, had given me a useful grasp of legal concepts. But it could scarcely prepare me for the texture and flavor, the sheer dailiness, of life at the court. So much happened behind closed doors. What did the justices do all day, anyway? I imagined them in earnest conversation with one another, grappling with the great legal questions of the day (in 1978 affirmative action was the most pressing). I learned only gradually that it isn’t like that at all, that except for their formal gatherings around the conference table once or twice a week, the justices spend their time, when they are not on the bench, in their chambers, alone or with their law clerks. Communications among them tend to be in writing, even today, and the ethos of the place discourages one justice from intruding on another’s space, physically or verbally. Membership in one of the world’s most exclusive clubs can be isolating, a little lonely, which I think is why those justices who enjoy companionship spend a fair amount of their free time on the road, speaking at law schools and judicial conferences.

In The Times’s Albany bureau, contact with the capitol’s newsmakers was constant, and feedback from them was instantaneous — not always pleasant, but essential for understanding competing perspectives and agendas, or simply for avoiding making the same mistake twice. Compared with the frenzied drama of the New York Legislature, the quiet of the Supreme Court press room was the silence of the tomb. In place of the easy banter with politicians that had made the Albany beat so engaging, there was an almost suffocating paper flow. Before I could work my way through one list of newly filed petitions to the court, two more would arrive.

Politics, comfortingly, had presented a moving target — an interpretation that seemed wrong today could well be proven correct tomorrow. But when it came to Supreme Court decisions, it was quite possible to get it wrong, flatly and irrevocably. And if I did get it wrong, how would I know? The fact that I received no feedback from those whose activities I was covering was hardly reassuring. It just underscored how different this new environment was going to be.

And yet I came to see my Albany experience as valuable, rather than irrelevant, to my new assignment. Watching the back-and-forth between a state legislature and the Supreme Court of the United States had given me a real sense of the court as an active participant in the ceaseless American dialogue about constitutional values and priorities, not a remote oracle.

For example, the New York Legislature in the 1970s was determined to channel taxpayer money to parochial schools. A majority of the Supreme Court was equally determined to keep that from happening. Session after legislative session in Albany, I reported on efforts to get around the latest Supreme Court ruling and to do indirectly (by providing textbooks or transportation rather than classroom instruction, for instance) what the court had said could not be done directly. It was a constitutional Ping-Pong match, foreshadowing, in its way, the recent one between the court and the Bush administration over the handling of the Guantánamo detainees; a battle over principle, to be sure, but also over who would get the last word.

There was another useful lesson for me in the struggle over parochial school aid: the court’s makeup changes, and so does the law. As an associate justice, William H. Rehnquist, who wanted to cultivate a much bigger space for religion in public life, planted a few seeds in arid soil. He tended those seeds assiduously as new allies joined the court and the climate warmed, until they germinated in the form of decisions like the one in 2002, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which upheld Ohio’s system of taxpayer-financed vouchers for parents to use for parochial school tuition. “A program of true private choice,” Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his 5-to-4 majority opinion — having established years earlier, in less freighted contexts, that when public money passes through parents’ hands, it loses its public character and its use becomes a “private choice.”

And then something interesting happened. The voucher movement, even though its constitutional shackles had been removed, stalled almost everywhere, owing not to the intervention of federal judges but to resistance from state courts, teachers’ unions and taxpayers. An ambitious legislative campaign by voucher advocates in 2004 ended in defeat in state after state. The court can only do so much. It can lead, but the country does not necessarily follow.

In fact, it is most often the Supreme Court that is the follower. It ratifies or consolidates change rather than propelling it, although in the midst of heated debate over a major case, it can often appear otherwise. Without delving into the vast political science and legal academic literature on this point, I’m simply offering my empirical observation that the court lives in constant dialogue with other institutions, formal and informal, and that when it strays too far outside the existing political or social consensus, the result is a palpable tension both inside and outside the court.

Such periods are fascinating, and inherently unstable. The early New Deal period is a classic example. The public demanded change, and the “nine old men” stood in the way. The “court-packing” crisis ensued; President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to back down from adding new and younger justices, and change came from inside the court anyway. Some decisions protecting the rights of criminal suspects, made by Earl Warren’s court in the 1960s, placed the court to the left of the country’s center (and provided useful campaign fodder for Richard M. Nixon).

A year ago, at the end of a Supreme Court term marked by sharp ideological divisions and attacks on precedent by a newly empowered conservative majority, I thought we were entering such a period; the court appeared to be moving to the right of the public. For example, the 5-to-4 decision blocking local communities from taking modest steps to preserve the hard-won gains of public school desegregation threatened to unravel delicate arrangements in school districts around the country. That remains a highly problematic decision, but the more muted and centrist tone of the term that just ended has made me less persuaded that the court is on a collision course with mainstream public opinion.

In any event, it is often the court that eventually retreats when it finds itself out of sync with the prevailing mood. That appeared to be the case with the “federalism revolution” that Chief Justice Rehnquist began in the mid-1990s. In a series of 5-to-4 decisions, the court declared that Congress did not have the power it assumed it had to make federal statutes binding on the states. These decisions, reflecting the chief justice’s longstanding goal to re-adjust the post-New Deal federal-state balance, signaled an abrupt jurisprudential shift.

But then 9/11 happened and the national mood changed. Suddenly, the federal government looked useful, even necessary. The Supreme Court’s federalism revolution had been overtaken by events. In 2003, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for a 6-to-3 majority that Congress acted within its constitutional authority when it said state governments could be sued for failing to give their employees the benefits required by the Family and Medical Leave Act. It was a decision of enormous symbolic significance. Without apology or much in the way of explanation, the chief justice gave up the fight and moved on.

I admired Chief Justice Rehnquist as a strategist and tactician; he knew what he wanted and knew his limits, just as in his weekly poker game he knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined the court in 1986, was a flashier attention-grabber, but I never had any doubt that William Rehnquist was the brains behind the court’s ascendant conservatives. He took his role seriously, but himself less so (unlike his stuffy predecessor, Warren E. Burger, the first chief justice of my tenure). When he emerged from behind the courtroom’s velvet curtain one morning in 1995 sporting four gold stripes on each sleeve of his robe — with some of his colleagues struggling to suppress smiles — many people saw pomposity, but I saw a wry or maybe even self-mocking comment on the boredom of basic black after 23 years on the court. He had another 10 years to go.

We had nothing approaching a confidential relationship, but we did chat now and then. On the morning after the 2000 presidential election, I ran into him on the court’s plaza as he was taking his morning walk. Wasn’t it amazing, we agreed, that the outcome of the election was still in doubt.

The court I began covering in 1978 was populated by men who were, for the most part, older than my father. Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan Jr. and Byron R. White were historic figures. Harry A. Blackmun had only a few years earlier been propelled from obscurity when he wrote the court’s 7-to-2 majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. Nine new justices joined the court during my time there. Of the original group, only John Paul Stevens remains. Three members of the court are younger than I am.

Amid all that change, nothing touched me as much as the arrival in September 1981 of Sandra Day O’Connor. I had never heard her name before President Ronald Reagan nominated her that summer to succeed Potter Stewart. Although I covered her confirmation hearing, she remained to me basically a blank slate. That didn’t matter. The first time I looked up from the press section and saw a woman sitting on the bench, I was thrilled in a way I would never have predicted. Her presence invaded my subconscious. I had recurring dreams about her. In one, she asked me my opinion on a pending case (something no justice ever did in real life). But mostly, she just had walk-on roles in ordinary nighttime dramas, her presence signifying what it meant to me to know that there was no longer a position in the legal profession that a woman could not aspire to.

Four summers later, I was pregnant. Encountering me in a hallway, Justice O’Connor asked me when the baby was due. “Just before the first Monday in October,” I replied. Sandra Day O’Connor, mother of three, laughed. “Oh, keep your legs crossed,” she urged. “Don’t let that baby come out until the First Monday!” Some 30 minutes into the first Monday in October 1985, my daughter, Hannah, came into the world. I later learned that right before going on the bench that morning for the term’s opening session, Justice O’Connor called the court’s public information office and asked: “Has anyone heard from Linda? Did she have her baby today?”

(Years later, my daughter bluntly reminded me that today’s young women have the luxury of taking for granted the pioneering accomplishments of a Sandra Day O’Connor or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When I observed that I was out of college before I ever met a woman who was a lawyer, the teenage Hannah regarded me with compassion. “Face it, Mom,” she said. “You’ve led a sheltered life.”)

Continuity and change, the entwined spirals of a double helix, are the court’s DNA. Continuity is anchored by the gravitational pull of precedent. Who would have believed that William Rehnquist, long a vocal critic of the Warren court’s Miranda decision, could write a majority opinion in 2000 not only reaffirming it but proclaiming that the Miranda warnings had become “part of our national culture”?

The pull of precedent is powerful but scarcely all-powerful when a shift of personnel or perspective breaks the spell, allowing the forces of change to exert their counterpull. The road from Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 decision that dismissed a claim of gay rights as “at best, facetious,” to Lawrence v. Texas, which 17 years later located the privacy rights of gay men and lesbians at the heart of constitutional due process, was paved, I have no doubt, by the justices’ experience of knowing gay men and women in their personal and professional lives.

But with so many important cases decided by such close margins (the two leading cases of the past term, on the rights of the Guantánamo detainees and the Second Amendment right to own a gun, were decided by votes of 5 to 4), perhaps fragility, rather than stability, best characterizes the court today, and that is a reminder of the stakes involved in any Supreme Court vacancy. The galvanizing battle over the nomination of Robert H. Bork in 1987, a conflagration at the intersection of law and politics that held the country spellbound for three months, was the most riveting public event I ever witnessed at close range. Although Judge Bork was, of course, defeated, in many ways the Bork battle has never really ended, with today’s ceaseless judicial confirmation wars being carried on by ideological combatants too young to remember the original.

President Reagan nominated Robert Bork, a well-known conservative, to the “swing” seat on the court being vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. I knew Bob Bork. He had been a professor of mine at Yale, an urbane and witty man who bore little resemblance to the instant portrait painted by his opponents. (“In Robert Bork’s America,” Senator Edward M. Kennedy famously said in response to the nomination, “there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women, and in our America there should be no seat on the Supreme Court for Robert Bork.”) The day he was nominated, I left a message on his home answering machine. “Congratulations, and keep your sense of humor,” I said. “I think you’ll need it.”

His sense of humor failed him. As the hearings went on, he became testy and abrupt. When he said that serving on the court would be an “intellectual feast,” he was simply being honest. It would have been more politic, but less candid, to claim that he was motivated by a desire to serve the cause of justice. He and his supporters emerged from defeat filled with bitterness, persuaded that he had been dealt an unfair hand.

To the contrary, I thought then and think now that the debate had been both fair and profound. In five days on the witness stand, Judge Bork had a chance to explain himself fully, to describe and defend his view that the Constitution’s text and the intent of its 18th-century framers provided the only legitimate tools for constitutional interpretation. Through televised hearings that engaged the public to a rare degree, the debate became a national referendum on the modern course of constitutional law. Judge Bork’s constitutional vision, anchored in the past, was tested and found wanting, in contrast to the later declaration by Judge Anthony M. Kennedy, the successful nominee, that the Constitution’s framers had “made a covenant with the future.”

It has made a substantial difference during these last 21 years that Anthony Kennedy got the seat intended for Robert Bork. The invective aimed at Justice Kennedy from the right this year alone, for his majority opinions upholding the rights of the Guantánamo detainees and overturning the death penalty for child rapists — 5-to-4 decisions that would surely have found Judge Bork on the opposite side — is a measure of the lasting significance of what happened during that long-ago summer and fall.

It is also a reminder of something I learned observing the court and the country, and listening in on the vital dialogue between them. The court is in Americans’ collective hands. We shape it; it reflects us. At any given time, we may not have the Supreme Court we want. We may not have the court we need. But we have, most likely, the Supreme Court we deserve.

    2,691 Decisions, NYT, 13.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13linda.html

Sidebar

3 Defining Opinions

July 13, 2008
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): The Triumph of Precedent? Reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion by a vote of 5 to 4. Three Republican-appointed justices in the majority, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter, said that while they would not necessarily have voted with the Roe v. Wade majority 19 years earlier, they believed it would damage the court to repudiate that precedent under political pressure. “The promise of constancy, once given, binds its maker,” they said.

Bush v. Gore (2000): The Triumph of Politics? Ended the Florida recount and effectively declared George W. Bush the president-elect. “We are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards,” the unsigned opinion read. A debate continues to this day over whether the five justices in the majority were motivated by politics or by the neutral principles they invoked.

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008): The Triumph of Originalism? Held that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep a loaded gun at home for self-defense. Justice Antonin Scalia, for the 5-to-4 majority, and Justice John Paul Stevens, for the dissent, each dissected the history of the Second Amendment. They came to opposite conclusions but proceeded on the premise that original understanding of the amendment’s framers was the proper basis for the decision.

    3 Defining Opinions, NYT, 13.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13greebox.html?ref=weekinreview

Justices Rule for Individual Gun Rights

June 27, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court declared for the first time on Thursday that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun, not just the right of the states to maintain militias.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the landmark 5-to-4 decision, said the Constitution does not allow “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.” In so declaring, the majority found that a gun-control law in the nation’s capital went too far by making it nearly impossible to own a handgun.

But the court held that the individual right to possess a gun “for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” is not unlimited. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Justice Scalia wrote.

The ruling does not mean, for instance, that laws against carrying concealed weapons are to be swept aside. Furthermore, Justice Scalia wrote, “The court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

The decision upheld a federal appeals court ruling that the District of Columbia’s gun law, one of the strictest in the country, went beyond constitutional limits. Not only did the 1976 law make it practically impossible for an individual to legally possess a handgun in the district, but it also spelled out rules for the storage of rifles and shotguns. But the court did not articulate a specific standard of review for what might be a reasonable restraint on the right to possess a firearm.

The court also said on Thursday that the district law’s requirement that lawful weapons be rendered essentially inoperable, by trigger locks or disassembly, was unconstitutional because it rendered the weapons useless for self-defense.

Joining Justice Scalia were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

A dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens asserted that the majority “would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.” Joining him were Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

The high court’s ruling was the first since 1939 to deal with the scope of the Second Amendment, and the first to so directly address the meaning of the amendment’s ambiguous, comma-laden text: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Not surprisingly, Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens differed on the clarity (or lack thereof) of the Second Amendment. “The amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second clause,” wrote Justice Scalia. “The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

Not at all, Justice Stevens countered, asserting that the majority “stakes its holding on a strained and unpersuasive reading of the amendment’s text.” Justice Stevens read his dissent from the bench, an unmistakable signal that he disagreed deeply with the majority.

Indeed, it was clear from the conflicting opinions of Justices Scalia and Stevens that the case had generated emotional as well as intellectual sparks at the court.

Justice Scalia devoted page after page of his opinion to the various state constitutions and to the use of language in the 18th and 19th centuries to support his view that an individual right to bear arms is embodied in the Constitution. And Justice Scalia, who clearly takes pride in his writing as well as his reasoning, used adjectives like “frivolous” and “bizarre” to describe the other side’s arguments.

Not to be outdone, Justice Stevens called the majority’s interpretation of the Second Amendment “overwrought and novel” and said it “calls to mind the parable of the six blind men and the elephant,” in which each of the sightless men had a different conception of the animal.

“Each of them, of course, has fundamentally failed to grasp the nature of the creature,” Justice Stevens wrote.

The ruling on Thursday will surely not quiet the debate about guns and violence in the United States, where deaths by firearm take a far higher toll than in many other countries, as Justice Scalia acknowledged.

“We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” he wrote, saying that he took seriously the concerns of those who believe that “prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution.”

Lawmakers in the District of Columbia and across the country may look to the decision as a blueprint for writing new legislation to satisfy the demands of constituents who say there is too much regulation of firearms now, or too little, depending on the sentiments in their regions. (Washington’s Mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, will instruct the police department to issue new handgun-registration rules within 30 days while city officials study the ruling, The Washington Post reported on its Web site.)

Nor was there any suggestion that the court’s ruling would lead to a proliferation of deadly, military-style assault weapons. Alluding to the 1939 Supreme Court decision, which held that the weapons protected under the Second Amendment were those “in common use at the time,” Justice Scalia said, “We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.’ ”

The White House issued a statement saying that President Bush “strongly agrees with the Supreme Court’s historic decision today that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of Americans to keep and bear arms.”

The Supreme Court ruling is likely to play out in this year’s elections, as Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, made clear. “I applaud this decision as well as the overturning of the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and limitations on the ability to use firearms for self-defense,” Mr. McCain said in a statement, which contained a reminder that his Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, refused to join him in signing an amicus brief in support of overturning the district’s law.

Indeed, Mr. Obama’s view, expressed in a statement, was more nuanced than Mr. McCain’s. “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures,” Mr. Obama said, predicting that the ruling would provide needed guidance for lawmakers.

The National Rifle Association and other supporters of rights to have firearms are sure to use the decision as a launch pad for lawsuits. The N.R.A. said it would file suits in San Francisco, Chicago and several Chicago suburbs challenging handgun restrictions there. “I consider this the opening salvo in a step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere that have been deprived of this freedom,” Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the N.R.A., told The Associated Press.

Reaction on Capitol Hill differed sharply. Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican minority leader in the House, applauded the ruling. “The Constitution plainly guarantees the solemn right to keep and bear arms, and the whims of politically correct bureaucrats cannot take it away,” he said in a statement.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a former mayor of San Francisco, said she was disappointed in the ruling. “I speak as a former mayor,” she said at a session of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I speak as somebody who has gone to homicide crime scenes.”

The last time the Supreme Court weighed a case involving the Second Amendment, in 1939, it decided a narrower question, finding that the Constitution did not protect any right to possess a specific type of firearm, the sawed-off shotgun.

By contrast, the issues in the District of Columbia case seemed much more “mainstream,” if that term can be used in reference to gun-control issues. When the justices announced on Nov. 20 that they were accepting the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290, they indicated that they would go to the heart of the long debate.

The question, they said, is whether the district’s restrictions on firearms “violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes.”

Dick Anthony Heller, a security guard who carries a handgun for his job protecting federal judiciary offices, challenged the District of Columbia’s law after his request for a license to keep his gun at home was rejected.

There have been debates about the efficacy of gun-control efforts in the capital. Those district residents who want guns — and are willing to risk punishment if caught with them without bothering to apply for permits — can get them easily enough, across the Potomac River in Virginia and in other nearby states.

Washington’s homicide rate, while high by world standards, is sharply lower than it was in the early 1990s. Last year, there were 181 homicides in Washington, down from a peak of 479 in 1991, when crack cocaine was a huge problem in some sections of the city.

Concluding his opinion, Justice Scalia wrote, “Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem.”

“That is perhaps debatable,” Justice Scalia wrote, “but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

When the Heller case was argued before the justices on March 18, Mr. Heller’s lawyer, Alan Gura, did not assert that the Second Amendment precluded any kind of ban related to gun possession. He said that a ban on the shipment of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns would be acceptable, and in answer to a question from the justices, so, too, might be a prohibition on guns in schools. Some of the justices signaled during arguments that they thought the District’s near-total ban on handguns went too far.

A legislature “has a great deal of leeway in regulating firearms,” Mr. Gura argued, but not to the extent of virtually banning them in homes.

The Washington law not only established high barriers to the private possession of handguns, it also required that rifles and shotguns be kept either in a disassembled state or under a trigger lock.

Walter Dellinger, the lawyer who argued for the district on March 18, asserted that “the people” and “the militia” were essentially the same, and that the Second Amendment gave people the right to bear arms only in connection with their militia service.

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, representing the federal government, argued on behalf of the individual-rights position, which has been the Bush administration’s policy. But he said that the appeals court had also gone too far in overturning the ordinance and that the right to bear arms was always subject to “reasonable regulations.”

    Justices Rule for Individual Gun Rights, NYT, 27.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/washington/27scotuscnd.html?hp

Editorial

Supreme Disgrace

October 11, 2007
The New York Times
 

The Supreme Court exerts leadership over the nation’s justice system, not just through its rulings, but also by its choice of cases — the ones it agrees to hear and the ones it declines. On Tuesday, it led in exactly the wrong direction.

Somehow, the court could not muster the four votes needed to grant review in the case of an innocent German citizen of Lebanese descent who was kidnapped, detained and tortured in a secret overseas prison as part of the Bush administration’s morally, physically and legally abusive anti-terrorism program. The victim, Khaled el-Masri, was denied justice by lower federal courts, which dismissed his civil suit in a reflexive bow to a flimsy government claim that allowing the case to go forward would put national security secrets at risk.

Those rulings, Mr. Masri’s lawyers correctly argued, represented a major distortion of the state secrets doctrine, a rule created by the federal courts that was originally intended to shield specific evidence in a lawsuit filed against the government. It was never designed to dictate dismissal of an entire case before any evidence is produced.

It may well be that one or more justices sensitive to the breathtaking violation of Mr. Masri’s rights, and the evident breaking of American law, refrained from voting to accept his case as a matter of strategy. They may have feared a majority ruling by the Roberts court approving the dangerously expansive view of executive authority inherent in the Bush team’s habitual invocation of the state secrets privilege. In that case, the justices at least could have commented, or offered a dissent, as has happened when the court abdicated its responsibility to hear at least two other recent cases involving national security issues of this kind.

Mr. Masri says he was picked up while vacationing in Macedonia in late 2003 and flown to a squalid prison in Afghanistan. He says he was questioned there about ties to terrorist groups and was beaten by his captors, some of whom were Americans. At the end of May 2004, Mr. Masri was released in a remote part of Albania without having been charged with a crime. Investigations in Europe and news reports in this country have supported his version of events, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged privately to her that Mr. Masri’s abduction was a mistake, an admission that aides to Ms. Rice have denied. The Masri case, in other words, is being actively discussed all over the world. The only place it cannot be discussed, it seems, is in a United States courtroom.

In effect, the Supreme Court has granted the government immunity for subjecting Mr. Masri to “extraordinary rendition,” the morally and legally unsupportable United States practice of transporting foreign nationals to be interrogated in other countries known to use torture and lacking basic legal protections. It’s hard to imagine what, at this point, needs to be kept secret, other than the ways in which the administration behaved irresponsibly, and quite possibly illegally, in the Masri case. And Mr. Masri is not the only innocent man kidnapped by American agents and subjected to abuse and torture in a foreign country. He’s just the only one whose lawsuit got this far.

This unsatisfactory outcome gives rise to new worries about the current Supreme Court’s resolve to perform its crucial oversight role — particularly with other cases related to terrorism in the pipeline and last week’s disclosure of secret 2005 Justice Department memos authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods that just about everyone except the Bush White House thinks of as torture. Instead of a rejection, the Masri case should have occasioned a frank revisiting of the Supreme Court’s 1953 ruling in United States v. Reynolds. That case enshrined the state secrets doctrine that this administration has repeatedly relied upon to avoid judicial scrutiny of its lawless actions.

Indeed, the Reynolds case itself is an object lesson in why courts need to apply a healthy degree of skepticism to state secrets claims. The court denied the widows of three civilians, who had died in the crash of a military aircraft, access to the official accident report, blindly accepting the government’s assertion that sharing the report would hurt national security. When the documents finally became public just a few years ago, it became clear that the government had lied. The papers contained information embarrassing to the government but nothing to warrant top secret treatment or denying American citizens honest adjudication of their lawsuit.

In refusing to consider Mr. Masri’s appeal, the Supreme Court has left an innocent person without any remedy for his wrongful imprisonment and torture. It has damaged America’s standing in the world and established the nation as Supreme Enabler of the Bush administration’s efforts to avoid accountability for its actions. These are not accomplishments to be proud of.

    Supreme Disgrace, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11thu1.html

Texas Ruling Signals Halt to Executions Indefinitely

October 3, 2007
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Oct. 2 — Signaling an indefinite halt to executions in Texas, the state’s highest criminal appeals court late Tuesday stayed the lethal injection of a 28-year-old Honduran man who was scheduled to be put to death Wednesday.

The reprieve by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was granted a week after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider whether a form of lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment barred under the Eighth Amendment. On Thursday, the Supreme Court stepped in to halt a planned execution in Texas at the last minute, and though many legal experts interpreted that as a signal for all states to wait for a final ruling on lethal injection before any further executions, Texas officials said they planned to move ahead with more.

As a result, Tuesday’s ruling by the Texas court was seen as a sign that judges in the nation’s leading death penalty state were taking guidance from the Supreme Court and putting off imminent executions.

The Texas court order gave state authorities up to 30 days to explain in legal papers why the execution of the inmate, Heliberto Chi, should proceed. With responses then certain from defense lawyers, the effect of the order was to put off the execution for months, lawyers said.

Mr. Chi was convicted of killing the manager of a men’s store in Arlington in 2001.

Other executions, including four more scheduled in the next five months, were also likely to be stayed, said David R. Dow of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit law clinic that worked on Mr. Chi’s appeal.

“Until the Court of Criminal Appeals addresses the questions raised in this case there will be no more executions in Texas,” predicted Mr. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston.

Acting less than a week after it rejected another inmate’s appeal 5 to 4, the appeals court justices provided no breakdown of the vote and did not give any reasoning for their decision. But they directed the state’s director of criminal justice, Nathaniel Quarterman, not to execute Mr. Chi and gave Mr. Quarterman and Tim Curry, the district attorney of Tarrant County, where the crime had been committed, up to 30 days to respond to claims by Mr. Chi’s lawyers that the formulation and administration of chemicals used for lethal injections did not quickly and painlessly kill but paralyzed the condemned inmates while they painfully suffocated.

Earlier Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 4 to 3 against recommending a stay for Mr. Chi. A request for a 30-day reprieve was also pending with Gov. Rick Perry.

Had the appeals court not halted the execution, Mr. Chi’s lawyers would have taken the case to the United States Supreme Court, which last Thursday stayed the execution for another Texas inmate, Carlton Turner Jr.

Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., and a law professor at New York University, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was a sign that while it was reviewing the legality of lethal injection in a Kentucky case, “it was at least unseemly for states to be carrying out executions.”

Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School, called the latest stay in Texas significant. “I do think Texas is reaching a turning point,” Ms. Denno said. “It’s not unusual throughout the country, but it is unusual in Texas. And not uncommonly when people are talking about the death penalty, there’s Texas and everywhere else, because Texas seems to be in its own death penalty world.”

But Diane Clements, president of Justice For All, a victims’ advocacy group in Texas, said the Supreme Court and the Texas appeals court gave no reasons for their rulings, “so we’re left here with no direction.”

The delays spelled more suffering for victims’ families, Ms. Clements said. “I’m sure family of that stayed-execution victim is on a roller coaster ride,” she said. “If there’s anything certain about the death penalty for families, it’s that it is very uncertain.”

    Texas Ruling Signals Halt to Executions Indefinitely, NYT, 3.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/us/03texas.html?hp

2 Patriot Act Provisions Ruled Unlawful

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:34 a.m. ET
The New York Times

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow secret wiretapping and searches without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, ''now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.''

Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield sought the ruling in a lawsuit against the federal government after he was mistakenly linked by the FBI to the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.

The federal government apologized and settled part of the lawsuit for $2 million after admitting a fingerprint was misread. But as part of the settlement, Mayfield retained the right to challenge parts of the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the authority of law enforcers to investigate suspected acts of terrorism.

Mayfield claimed that secret searches of his house and office under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. Aiken agreed with Mayfield, repeatedly criticizing the government.

''For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law -- with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,'' she wrote.

By asking her to dismiss Mayfield's lawsuit, the judge said, the U.S. attorney general's office was ''asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so.''

Elden Rosenthal, an attorney for Mayfield, issued a statement on his behalf praising the judge, saying she ''has upheld both the tradition of judicial independence, and our nation's most cherished principle of the right to be secure in one's own home.''

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said the agency was reviewing the decision, and he declined to comment further.

The ruling probably won't have any immediate affect on enforcement under the Patriot Act, according to legal experts who predicted the government would quickly appeal.

''But it's an important first step,'' said Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security project.

Jaffer noted that the Patriot Act carries dozens of provisions and that several have been challenged -- but that this is one of the first major rulings on Fourth Amendment rights.

''This is as clear a violation of the Fourth Amendment as you'll ever find,'' Jaffer said.

Garrett Epps, a constitutional law expert at the University of Oregon, said the ruling adds to the poor record that the Bush administration has piled up in defending the Patriot Act.

''It's embarrassing,'' Epps said. ''It represents another judicial repudiation of this administration's terrorist surveillance policies.''

A federal judge in New York this month handed the ACLU a victory in a challenge to the Patriot Act on behalf of an Internet service provider that was issued a ''national security letter'' demanding customer phone and computer records. The judge in that case ruled the FBI must justify to a court the need for secrecy for more than a brief and reasonable period of time.

Mayfield, a Muslim convert, was taken into custody on May 6, 2004, because of a fingerprint found on a detonator at the scene of the Madrid bombing. The FBI said the print matched Mayfield's. He was released about two weeks later, and the FBI admitted it had erred in saying the fingerprints were his and later apologized to him.

Before his arrest, the FBI put Mayfield under 24-hour surveillance, listened to his phone calls and surreptitiously searched his home and law office.

The Mayfield case has been an embarrassment for the federal government. Last year, the Justice Department's internal watchdog faulted the FBI for sloppy work in mistakenly linking Mayfield to the Madrid bombings. That report said federal prosecutors and FBI agents had made inaccurate and ambiguous statements to a federal judge to get arrest and criminal search warrants against Mayfield.

Congress passed the Patriot Act with little debate shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to help counter terrorist activities. It gave federal law enforcers the authority to search telephone and e-mail communications and expanded the Treasury Department's regulation of financial transactions involving foreign nationals. The law was renewed in 2005.

In early August, the Bush administration persuaded lawmakers to expand the government's power to listen in on any foreign communication it deemed of interest without a court order, even if an American was a party. The expanded surveillance authority expires early next year. As Congress takes a closer look at the law, many Democrats want to rein in language that many consider overly broad.

    2 Patriot Act Provisions Ruled Unlawful, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Patriot-Act-Lawsuit.html

Supreme Court Limits Schools on Race

June 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:15 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected school assignment plans that take account of students' race in two major public school districts. The decisions could imperil similar plans nationwide. The Court also blocked the execution of a Texas killer whose lawyers argued that he should not be put to death because he is mentally ill.

Today is probably the Court's last session until October.

The school rulings in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle leave public school systems with a limited arsenal to maintain racial diversity.

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court's other three liberals.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion in which he said race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity.

He agreed with Roberts that the plans in Louisville and Seattle went too far. He said, however, that to the extent that Roberts' opinion could be interpreted as foreclosing the use of race in any circumstance, ''I disagree with that reasoning.''

The two school systems in Thursday's decisions employ slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which school they would attend.

In the case involving the mentally ill killer in Texas, the court ruled 5-4 in the case of Scott Louis Panetti, who shot his in-laws to death 15 years ago in front of his wife and young daughter.

The convicted murderer says that he suffers from a severe documented illness that is the source of gross delusions. ''This argument, we hold, should have been considered,'' said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion.

Panetti's lawyers wanted the court to determine that people who cannot understand the connection between their crime and punishment because of mental illness may not be executed.

The Eighth Amendment of the Constitution bars ''the execution of a person who is so lacking in rational understanding that he cannot comprehend that he is being put to death because of the crime he was convicted of committing,'' they said in court papers.

In a third case, the Court abandoned a 96-year-old ban on manufacturers and retailers setting price floors for products.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said that agreements on minimum prices are legal if they promote competition.

The ruling means that accusations of minimum pricing pacts will be evaluated case by case.

The Supreme Court declared in 1911 that minimum pricing agreements violate federal antitrust law.

    Supreme Court Limits Schools on Race, NYT, 28.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Rdp.html

A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Helps Sway Judiciary

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
 

n March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

The first two editions of Professor Tribe’s influential treatise on constitutional law, in 1978 and 1988, endorsed the collective rights view. The latest, published in 2000, sets out his current interpretation.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

The earlier consensus, the law professors said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution. “The standard liberal position,” Professor Levinson said, “is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.”

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Some transcriptions of the amendment omit the last comma.)

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment’s protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

The individual rights view is far from universally accepted. “The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion supports the near-unanimous view of the federal courts that the constitutional right to be armed is linked to an organized militia,” said Dennis A. Henigan, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The exceptions attract attention precisely because they are so rare and unexpected.”

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

If the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit does not step in and reverse the 2-to-1 panel decision striking down a law that forbids residents to keep handguns in their homes, the question of the meaning of the Second Amendment is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. The answer there is far from certain.

That too is a change. In 1992, Warren E. Burger, a former chief justice of the United States appointed by President Richard M. Nixon, expressed the prevailing view.

“The Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all,” Mr. Burger said in a speech. In a 1991 interview, Mr. Burger called the individual rights view “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Even as he spoke, though, the ground was shifting underneath him. In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group that supports gun rights, and a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Parker case, said four factors accounted for the success of the suit. The first, Mr. Levy said, was “the shift in scholarship toward an individual rights view, particularly from liberals.”

He also cited empirical research questioning whether gun control laws cut down on crime; a 2001 decision from the federal appeals court in New Orleans that embraced the individual rights view even as it allowed a gun prosecution to go forward; and the Bush administration’s reversal of a longstanding Justice Department position under administrations of both political parties favoring the collective rights view.

Filing suit in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Professor Bogus, a supporter of the collective rights view, said the Parker decision represented a milestone in that strategy. “This is the story of an enormously successful and dogged campaign to change the conventional view of the right to bear arms,” he said.

The text of the amendment is not a model of clarity, and arguments over its meaning tend to be concerned with whether the first part of the sentence limits the second. The history of its drafting and contemporary meaning provide support for both sides as well.

The Supreme Court has not decided a Second Amendment case since 1939. That ruling was, as Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a liberal judge on the federal appeals court in San Francisco acknowledged in 2002, “somewhat cryptic,” again allowing both sides to argue that Supreme Court precedent aided their interpretation of the amendment.

Still, nine federal appeals courts around the nation have adopted the collective rights view, opposing the notion that the amendment protects individual gun rights. The only exceptions are the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and the District of Columbia Circuit. The Second Circuit, in New York, has not addressed the question.

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

The decision in Parker has been stayed while the full appeals court decides whether to rehear the case.

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

    A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Helps Sway Judiciary, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/us/06firearms.html

Supreme Court Throws Out 3 Death Sentences

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court threw out death sentences for three Texas killers Wednesday because of problems with instructions given jurors who were deciding between life in prison and death.

In the case of LaRoyce Lathair Smith, the court set aside the death penalty for the second time. It also reversed death sentences for Brent Ray Brewer and Jalil Abdul-Kabir.

The cases all stem from jury instructions that Texas hasn't used since 1991. Under those rules, courts have found that jurors were not allowed to give sufficient weight to factors that might cause them to impose a life sentence instead of death.

The three 5-4 rulings had the same lineup of justices, with Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and John Paul Stevens forming the majority.

''When the jury is not permitted to give meaningful effect or a 'reasoned moral response' to a defendant's mitigating evidence...the sentencing process is fatally flawed,'' Stevens wrote in Abdul-Kabir's case

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Roberts took aim at his colleagues in the majority in dissents he wrote in the Abdul-Kabir and Brewer cases. The court should have deferred to lower court rulings against the defendants because there was no clearly established federal law that judges could have followed to grant relief.

''Whatever the law may be today, the Court's ruling that 'twas always so -- and that state courts were 'objectively unreasonable' not to know it -- is utterly revisionist,'' Roberts said.

Smith was sentenced to die for the murder of Jennifer Soto, a former coworker at a Taco Bell who was stabbed and shot in a failed robbery.

In 2004, the justices overturned Smith's sentence because jurors were not allowed to consider sufficiently the abuse and neglect that Smith had suffered as a child.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reinstated the death penalty, however, saying any errors involving the jury instructions were harmless.

Abdul-Kabir, also known as Ted Calvin Cole, was convicted in 1988 of using a dog leash to strangle Raymond Richardson, 66, during a $20 robbery at his San Angelo home. Abdul-Kabir's lawyers contend the jury that condemned him had no way to take into account the mistreatment and abandonment that contributed to his violent adult behavior.

The same sentencing problems applied to Brewer, convicted of fatally stabbing 66-year-old Robert Laminack, who was attacked in 1990 outside his Amarillo flooring business and robbed of $140. Brewer was abused as a child and suffered from mental illness, factors his jurors weren't allowed to consider, according to his petition.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the death penalty for Brewer and Abdul-Kabir.

Forty-seven inmates on Texas' death row were sentenced under the rules that the state abandoned in 1991.

The cases are Smith v. Texas, 05-11304, Brewer v. Quarterman, 05-11287, and Abdul-Kabir v. Quarterman, 05-11284.

    Supreme Court Throws Out 3 Death Sentences, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Death-Penalty.html

Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Abortion Procedure

April 18, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act ''have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases,'' Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

The administration had defended the law as drawing a bright line between abortion and infanticide.

Reacting to the ruling, Bush said that it affirms the progress his administration has made to uphold the ''sanctity of life.''

''I am pleased that the Supreme Court has upheld a law that prohibits the abhorrent procedure of partial birth abortion,'' he said. ''Today's decision affirms that the Constitution does not stand in the way of the people's representatives enacting laws reflecting the compassion and humanity of America.''

The decision pitted the court's conservatives against its liberals, with President Bush's two appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, siding with the majority.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also were in the majority.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how -- not whether -- to perform an abortion.

Abortion rights groups as well as the leading association of obstetricians and gynecologists have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.

''I applaud the Court for its ruling today, and my hope is that it sets the stage for further progress in the fight to ensure our nation's laws respect the sanctity of unborn human life,'' said Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, Republican leader in the House of Representatives.

Said Eve Gartner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America: ''This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women's health and safety. ... This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them.'' She had argued that point before the justices.

More than 1 million abortions are performed in the United States each year, according to recent statistics. Nearly 90 percent of those occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and are not affected by Wednesday's ruling.

Six federal courts have said the law that was in focus Wednesday is an impermissible restriction on a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The law bans a method of ending a pregnancy, rather than limiting when an abortion can be performed.

''Today's decision is alarming,'' Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent. She said the ruling ''refuses to take ... seriously'' previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.

Ginsburg said the latest decision ''tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.''

Ginsburg said that for the first time since the court established a woman's right to an abortion in 1973, ''the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.''

She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman's uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.

Abortion opponents say the law will not reduce the number of abortions performed because an alternate method -- dismembering the fetus in the uterus -- is available and, indeed, much more common.

In 2000, the court with key differences in its membership struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortions. Writing for a 5-4 majority at that time, Justice Breyer said the law imposed an undue burden on a woman's right to make an abortion decision.

The Republican-controlled Congress responded in 2003 by passing a federal law that asserted the procedure is gruesome, inhumane and never medically necessary to preserve a woman's health. That statement was designed to overcome the health exception to restrictions that the court has demanded in abortion cases.

But federal judges in California, Nebraska and New York said the law was unconstitutional, and three appellate courts agreed. The Supreme Court accepted appeals from California and Nebraska, setting up Wednesday's ruling.

Kennedy's dissent in 2000 was so strong that few court watchers expected him to take a different view of the current case.

Kennedy acknowledged continuing disagreement about the procedure within the medical community. In the past, courts have cited that uncertainty as a reason to allow the disputed procedure.

But Kennedy said, ''The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice.''

He said the more common abortion method, involving dismemberment, is beyond the reach of the federal ban.

While the court upheld the law against a broad attack on its constitutionality, Kennedy said the court could entertain a challenge in which a doctor found it necessary to perform the banned procedure on a patient suffering certain medical complications.

Doctors most often refer to the procedure as a dilation and extraction or an intact dilation and evacuation abortion.

The law allows the procedure to be performed when a woman's life is in jeopardy.

The cases are Gonzales v. Carhart, 05-380, and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, 05-1382.

    Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Abortion Procedure, NYT, 18.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Abortion.html

Supreme Court Rejects Request to Reinsert Feeding Tube

March 24, 2005
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and MARIA NEWMAN

LEARWATER, Fla., March 23 - The Supreme Court today turned down a request by Terri Schiavo's parents for an emergency order to restore the Florida woman's feeding tube, and a few hours later a Florida judge turned down a request by Gov. Jeb Bush to intervene in the case.

The two decisions leave the parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, with little hope to keep alive their daughter, who suffered serious brain damage when she collapsed 15 years ago.

The tube was removed on Friday, on the order of the state judge, George W. Greer, and the parents' efforts to have it reinserted attracted the attention of Congress and President Bush, who rushed through special legislation to help them.

In a one-sentence notice, the Supreme Court said the matter had been presented to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, and referred by him to the full court. But it offered no explanation as to why it was denied. The justices seldom elaborate when they turn down cases decided by lower courts.

A few hours later, Judge Greer, of Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court in Florida, ruled against new efforts by Gov. Bush and Florida's social services agency to intervene in the case to have further examinations done on Ms. Schiavo. The governor said Wednesday that a doctor who had seen videotapes of Ms. Schiavo and visited with her for 90 minutes, but had not performed a physical exam, had concluded that she might not be in a persistent vegetative state, as other doctors have testified to the courts.

It is unclear what the Schindlers plan to do next, as they did not immediately comment on today's two critical decisions. In one of the last pending legal matters, a hearing is scheduled for 6 p.m. today in federal court in Tampa to hear an amended version of a lawsuit filed by David Gibbs, a lawyer for the parents, which contends that Ms. Schiavo's civil rights were denied by the state courts.

George Felos, the lawyer for Ms. Schiavo's husband, Michael, told reporters earlier today that "the new claims raised are even more insubstantial than the old claims."

"It saddens me greatly that we have to run to court to get court orders to protect Terri Schiavo from the abuse of the state of Florida," Mr. Felos said.

The Schindlers have been locked in a legal battle for eight years with their son-in-law, who has said Ms. Schiavo told him she did not want to be kept alive by artificial means.

Just after midnight on Monday, Congress passed a law that Mr. Bush signed an hour later that transferred the case from state to federal courts.

But in short order, their efforts failed to sway a federal district judge in Florida, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court in Atlanta and the full appeals court, all of whom declined to order the reinsertion of the tube. Today's Supreme Court decision seems to have exhausted the legislative efforts to help.

Mr. Felos said he was "grateful" for the Supreme Court decision.

"It should become obvious to everyone and every observer that the entire judicial system of the United States, the state courts in the state of Florida, the entire federal judiciary, has said, this case must end, this case is over," Mr. Felos told reporters. "Mrs. Schiavo's legal rights have been ruled on again and again and again. The courts have consistently found that she did not want to remain alive artificially.

"Her wishes should be carried out," he said. "And in that spirit, I hope that the parents do not keep pursing fruitless legal options to the end. I think their time would be better served in reflection."

A White House spokesman, Dana M. Perino, said that President Bush was told of the Supreme Court's decision while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., The Associated Press said.

"The president looked at all options before signing the legislation last weekend," Ms. Perino said. "He felt that the legislation passed by Congress was the best course of action. Terri Schiavo's case is extraordinary and sad.

"As the president said yesterday, he believes that in a case such as this, the legislative branch and the executive branch should err on the side of life," Ms. Perino said.

The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, who led efforts to pass the Congressional action, reacted in a statement to the Supreme Court decision.

"I'm saddened by the decision of the court to reject Terri Schiavo's case for life despite a compelling case for reexamination of the medical evidence," the senator said. "It is a sad day for her loving family and for their innocent and voiceless daughter."

And House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, who also led efforts to help the Schindlers, said in a a joint statement issued with F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, that they felt "sadness and disappointment" about the Supreme Court decision.

"Sadly, Mrs. Schiavo will not receive a new and full review of her case as the legislation required," they said, adding they "strongly believe that the court erred in reaching its conclusion and that once again they have chosen to ignore the clear intent of Congress."

They urged "Governor Bush and the Florida legislature to continue examining all options to save Terri's life."On Wednesday, the Florida Senate rejected a measure that would have blocked doctors from withdrawing life support from patients who had not issued written instructions.

As word of the Supreme Court decision spread through the crowd of supporters outside the hospice in Pinellas Park where Ms. Schiavo resides, there was a sadness and anger about Ms. Schiavo's deteriorating condition.

"Yesterday, the legislative options closed," the Rev. Pat Mahoney of the National Clergy Council said to the crowd through a megaphone. "Today the legal options closed. Gov. Bush is now the only practical hope here for Terri Schiavo. We plead with Gov. Bush and the D.C.F. to intercede. Let us pray right now for that."

Mr. Felos told reporters that Mr. Schiavo has been with his wife throughout these last few days since her feeding tube was removed.

"Terri is peaceful," he said about Ms. Schiavo's condition. "She's resting comfortably. She's dying. She's in her death process. She's being attended to by a team of wonderful and compassionate professional health care workers at hospice who are well-trained to see that her physical needs are met and she be able to die with dignity and with peace."

Late Wednesday afternoon, state lawyers appeared before Judge Greer and asked to intervene in the case.

Judge Greer did not rule on their request immediately, but he granted a request from Ms. Schiavo's husband to bar the state's Department of Children and Families from removing her from the hospice where she has gone six days without her feeding tube and from providing her with nutrition or hydration.

Mr. Felos said he had heard "credible" rumors that state officials planned to send doctors to the hospice to give Ms. Schiavo intravenous fluids. Judge Greer also directed state sheriffs to take whatever actions were necessary to enforce the order.

The hearing in Judge Greer's court came at the end of day in which Ms. Schiavo's parents suffered several setbacks in their efforts to force doctors to reinsert the tube, which had provided food and water to her for 15 years.

First, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a lower-court ruling that rejected a resumption of feeding. That decision was upheld in the afternoon by the full appellate court on a 10-to-2 vote.

Speaking Wednesday from Tallahassee before Judge Greer's hearing, Governor Bush indicated the state might indeed try to take custody of Ms. Schiavo, which the law would allow it to do under certain circumstances.

He said a new review by Dr. William P. Cheshire, a neurologist in Jacksonville, suggested that Ms. Schiavo had been misdiagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state," meaning she cannot think, emote or remember.

Dr. Cheshire, who visited Ms. Schiavo in her hospice room for an hour and a half on March 1 and reviewed videotapes of her made by her parents, said that instead she appeared to be minimally conscious.

"This new information raises serious concerns and warrants immediate action," Mr. Bush said. "If there's any uncertainty, we should err on the side of protecting her."

Dr. Cheshire is the director of a laboratory at the Mayo Clinic branch in Jacksonville that deals with unconscious reflexes like digestion, and the director of biotech ethics at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a nonprofit group founded by "more than a dozen leading Christian bioethicists," in the words of its Web site. The clinic said in a statement that the state had invited Dr. Cheshire to offer his opinion. Other doctors who have examined Ms. Schiavo for the Florida courts have declared her to be irredeemably brain damaged.

Abby Goodnough reported from Clearwater for this article and Maria Newman from New York. Adam Liptak contributed reporting from New York.

    Supreme Court Rejects Request to Reinsert Feeding Tube, NYT, 24.3.2005n http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/politics/24cnd-schia.html

Constitution of the United States

The Constitution: Amendments 11-27

U.S. National Archives & Records Administration

AMENDMENT XI
Passed by Congress March 4, 1794. Ratified February 7, 1795.

Note: Article III, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by amendment 11.

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.

AMENDMENT XII

Passed by Congress December 9, 1803. Ratified June 15, 1804.

Note: A portion of Article II, section 1 of the Constitution was superseded by the 12th amendment.

The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate; -- the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; -- The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. [And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. --]* The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

*Superseded by section 3 of the 20th amendment.

AMENDMENT XIII

Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.

Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment.

Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Note: Article I, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 2 of the 14th amendment.

Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age,* and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section 3.
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

*Changed by section 1 of the 26th amendment.

AMENDMENT XV

Passed by Congress February 26, 1869. Ratified February 3, 1870.

Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude--

Section 2.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

AMENDMENT XVI

Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913.

Note: Article I, section 9, of the Constitution was modified by amendment 16.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

AMENDMENT XVII

Passed by Congress May 13, 1912. Ratified April 8, 1913.

Note: Article I, section 3, of the Constitution was modified by the 17th amendment.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.

This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.

AMENDMENT XVIII

Passed by Congress December 18, 1917. Ratified January 16, 1919. Repealed by amendment 21.

Section 1.
After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2.
The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

AMENDMENT XIX

Passed by Congress June 4, 1919. Ratified August 18, 1920.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

AMENDMENT XX

Passed by Congress March 2, 1932. Ratified January 23, 1933.

Note: Article I, section 4, of the Constitution was modified by section 2 of this amendment. In addition, a portion of the 12th amendment was superseded by section 3.

Section 1.
The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

Section 2.
The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.

Section 3.
If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

Section 4.
The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.

Section 5.
Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.

Section 6.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.

AMENDMENT XXI

Passed by Congress February 20, 1933. Ratified December 5, 1933.

Section 1.
The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2.
The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

Section 3.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

AMENDMENT XXII

Passed by Congress March 21, 1947. Ratified February 27, 1951.

Section 1.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.

AMENDMENT XXIII

Passed by Congress June 16, 1960. Ratified March 29, 1961.

Section 1.
The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as Congress may direct:

A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.

Section 2.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

AMENDMENT XXIV

Passed by Congress August 27, 1962. Ratified January 23, 1964.

Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.

Section 2.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

AMENDMENT XXV

Passed by Congress July 6, 1965. Ratified February 10, 1967.

Note: Article II, section 1, of the Constitution was affected by the 25th amendment.

Section 1.
In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

Section 2.
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section 3.
Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

Section 4.
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

AMENDMENT XXVI

Passed by Congress March 23, 1971. Ratified July 1, 1971.

Note: Amendment 14, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 1 of the 26th amendment.

Section 1.
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

AMENDMENT XXVII

Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

    The Constitution: Amendments 11-27, U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html

The Bill of Rights: A Transcription

1791 - Bill of Rights guarantees individual freedom.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1230058.stm

The Preamble to The Bill of Rights

Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York,
on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

Note: The following text is a transcription of the first ten amendments to the Constitution in their original form. These amendments were ratified December 15, 1791, and form what is known as the "Bill of Rights."

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Amendment VII

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

    The Bill of Rights: A Transcription,  U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html

The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription

U.S. National Archives & Records Administration

1787 - Founding Fathers draw up new constitution for United States of America.
Constitution comes into effect in 1788.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1230058.stm

 

Note: The following text is a transcription of the Constitution in its original form.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.


Article. I.

Section. 1.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section. 2.

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Section. 3.

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

Section. 4.

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.

Section. 5.

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy; and the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.

Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.

Section. 6.

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

Section. 7.

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Section. 9.

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another; nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Section. 10.

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

Article. II.

Section. 1.

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Section. 2.

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Section. 3.

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

Section. 4.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Article III.

Section. 1.

The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

Section. 2.

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;-- between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States;--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.

Section. 3.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Article. IV.

Section. 1.

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

Section. 2.

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Section. 3.

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.

Section. 4.

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.

Article. V.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Article. VI.

All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Article. VII.

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

The Word, "the," being interlined between the seventh and eighth Lines of the first Page, the Word "Thirty" being partly written on an Erazure in the fifteenth Line of the first Page, The Words "is tried" being interlined between the thirty second and thirty third Lines of the first Page and the Word "the" being interlined between the forty third and forty fourth Lines of the second Page.

Attest William Jackson Secretary

Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,

G°. Washington
Presidt and deputy from Virginia

Delaware
Geo: Read
Gunning Bedford jun
John Dickinson
Richard Bassett
Jaco: Broom

Maryland
James McHenry
Dan of St Thos. Jenifer
Danl. Carroll

Virginia
John Blair
James Madison Jr.

North Carolina
Wm. Blount
Richd. Dobbs Spaight
Hu Williamson

South Carolina
J. Rutledge
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Charles Pinckney
Pierce Butler

Georgia
William Few
Abr Baldwin

New Hampshire
John Langdon
Nicholas Gilman

Massachusetts
Nathaniel Gorham
Rufus King

Connecticut
Wm. Saml. Johnson
Roger Sherman

New York
Alexander Hamilton

New Jersey
Wil: Livingston
David Brearley
Wm. Paterson
Jona: Dayton

Pennsylvania
B Franklin
Thomas Mifflin
Robt. Morris
Geo. Clymer
Thos. FitzSimons
Jared Ingersoll
James Wilson
Gouv Morris

    The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription, U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_transcript.html

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