Judicial notebook: Psychology and the Supreme Court: Cases awaiting decision

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary B. Melton
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
The Supreme Court

EXPRESSIVE MEANING, RACE, AND THE LAW:

Legal Theory ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-99
Author(s):  
Andrew Altman
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Expressive Meaning ◽  
The Law

Recently, legal and social thinkers have turned to the idea that actions possess a nonlinguistic meaning, called “expressive meaning.” In this article I examine the idea of expressive meaning and its role in legal reasoning. My focus is on a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving constitutional challenges to election districts drawn on the basis of race. The Supreme Court used the idea of expressive meaning in striking down the districts. After explicating the idea of expressive meaning, I explain and criticize the Court’s reasoning. I distinguish the approach of Justices Thomas and Scalia, who hold that all uses of race in districting do constitutional harm, from that of Justice O’Connor, who distinguishes uses of race that do constitutional harm from those that do not. I contend that Justice O’Connor is right to make the distinction but she draws the line using a questionable standard. A more defensible standard would be more accommodating to the districts that the Court invalidated.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas A. Powe
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Local State ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Entire Nation ◽  
Constitutional Adjudication ◽  
The Impact

This book examines the impact of Supreme Court cases from Texas on the entire nation. It argues that the most important Supreme Court cases have originated in Texas, which help explain why it is Texas and not California that provides breadth and depth to constitutional adjudication. Texas litigants, lawyers, politicians, and judges all play important roles in the underlying interplay of law and politics at the local, state, and national levels. In all its facets, Texas offers a window to all constitutional law and the Supreme Court. The book shows that Texas's impact literally started at the beginning by precipitating a debate over national powers and then a war with Mexico, and that the fraught relationship between Texas, the nation, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court in the century and a half since Texas v. White has produced more constitutional law than any other state.

Let Them Plow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Regional Variations ◽  
The Supreme Court

Chapter Two examines a handful of pivotal Supreme Court cases brought against school desegregation at the turn of the century and the first few decades of the 20th century. The Cumming v. Georgia case in 1899 indicated a demand for equality on the basis of taxpayer status that was understood by the plaintiffs to be intertwined with race, a demand that was interpreted by the Supreme Court only in the language of taxation and federalism. This chapter also highlights regional variations and a number of cases brought at the height of Jim Crow segregation by people of color who fell outside the black-white paradigm, even if courts then imposed it on them.

A Basic Right to Marry: Israeli Style

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayelet Blecher-Prigat
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Israeli Supreme Court ◽  
The Right ◽  
Intimate Partnerships ◽  
Legal Marriage

This article questions the value of the basic right to marry that was recognised by the Israeli Supreme Court in the early 2000s as part of the basic right to human dignity. Since its early days, Israeli law has developed a tradition that has diminished the significance of formal marriage as a way to bypass the religious-based restrictions on marriage in Israel, with the emphasis instead on the idea of functional joint intimate lives.Against this legal background, the article explores the basic right to marry. It discusses and analyses the Supreme Court cases that have recognised a basic right to marry. It then considers several options to help in understanding the meaning of this right, and supports an understanding of the right to marry within a framework of equality, according to which human dignity requires equality in affording official recognition to intimate partnerships. Nonetheless, given the potentially limited effect of a basic right to marry in Israel, the article considers the idea of abolishing legal marriage in Israel altogether. Responding to potential critique by reference to the unique Israeli context, it suggests that such abolition could resolve the continuous conflict between Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state and its self-definition as a democratic state in the context of recognising adult intimate relationships. As presented in this article, constitutional limitations do not stand in the way for the State of Israel to abolish legal marriage.

scholarly journals Toward the Resegregation of Southern Schools: African American Suburbanization and Historical Erasure inFreeman v. Pitts

2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 451-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Amsterdam
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
School Officials ◽  
Suburban School Districts ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Us Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

This article reconstructs the story behindFreeman v. Pitts(1992), one of the main US Supreme Court cases that made it easier for school districts to terminate court desegregation orders and that, in turn, helped to propel a widely documented trend: the resegregation of southern schools. The case in part hinged on the question of whether school officials in an Atlanta suburb were responsible for the racial segregation that had developed in the area alongside the rapid settlement of African Americans there in the late twentieth century. Thus, along with shedding new light on how the South transitioned from an era focused on desegregation to one enabling resegregation, the article makes contributions to two areas of increasing scholarly interest: the history of African American suburbanization and the history of suburban school districts. Finally, the article underscores disconcerting patterns in how the Supreme Court utilized history inFreeman.

Prison Overcrowding Cases in the Aftermath of Wilson V. Seiter

1995 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACK E. CALL
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
Lower Court ◽  
Prison Overcrowding ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Deliberate Indifference

In 1991, the Supreme Court held in Wilson v. Seiter that in a prison conditions case, the plaintiff must prove that prison officials acted with deliberate indifference to the plaintiff's constitutional rights. Although this decision might appear to make it more difficult for inmates to win overcrowding lawsuits, it is predicted that this will not be the case. Published lower-court overcrowding cases are examined to determine what the effect of Wilson ( and two other Supreme Court cases decided since Wilson) has been. It is concluded that, although the number of published lower-court overcrowding cases since Wilson is not large, early indications are that these recent Supreme Court cases are not likely to have a dramatic impact upon the legal environment for prison overcrowding cases.

scholarly journals Why License Agreements Do Not Control Copy Ownership: First Sales and Essential Copies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian W. Carver
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Bargaining Power ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
License Agreements ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
First Sale ◽  
First Sale Doctrine

In this paper I argue for an analytic approach that courts should employ when determining ownership of a tangible copy of a copyrighted work. Courts are surprisingly divided on this apparently simple question, as I will detail several distinct and conflicting approaches, sometimes adopted within the same Circuit. I argue that a correct approach to determining copy ownership must be logically correct, must respect precedent, and must respect congressional choices. To be logically correct, a court's approach must not equivocate with respect to the ambiguously used term "license" and must not conflate ownership of a copy with ownership of a copyright. It also must not look to factors that are wholly orthogonal to resolving the issue. To respect precedent, a court's approach must consider the lessons of the few relevant Supreme Court cases – which are now rarely cited at all – and should not needlessly create Circuit conflicts. These precedents suggest that the Supreme Court is hostile to boilerplate attempts to use contract to thwart the first sale doctrine and has repeatedly rejected contract restrictions that attempt to expand the monopoly granted by Congress beyond its intended scope. To respect congressional choices, a court's approach should recognize how the careful enumeration of a copyright owner's rights in 17 U.S.C. § 106 and the limitations on and exceptions to those rights in sections 107 through 122 act together to create federal policies, embodied in the Copyright Act, that achieve the purposes and objectives of Congress. Once these sections and their interaction are properly understood, courts must at least ask whether the enforcement of un-negotiated contracts of adhesion between parties of unequal bargaining power is statutorily or constitutionally preempted. In presenting the approaches taken by courts and in arguing for a correct approach I will conclude that a right to perpetual possession of a copy is the primary, if not the dispositive factor, in correctly determining copy ownership. I conclude by applying this approach to the facts of MDY Industries LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in order to illustrate why the district court's holding on copy ownership was erroneous.Suggested Citation: Brian W. Carver, Why License Agreements Do Not Control Copy Ownership: First Sales and Essential Copies, 25 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1887 (2010).

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