scholarly journals Patterson v. McLean: A Confirmation of the New Right at the U.S. Supreme Court

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 987-1009
Author(s):  
George M. Sullivan

In two consecutive national elections a conservative, Ronald Reagan, was elected President of the United States. When Justice Lewis Powell announced his retirement during the late months of the Reagan administration, it was apparent that the President's last appointment could shift the ideology of the Court to conservatism for the first time since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. President Reagan's prior appointments, Sandra Day O'Connor and Antonin Scalia, had joined William Rehnquist, an appointee of President Nixon and Bryon White, an appointee of President Kennedy to comprise a vociferous minority of four in many instances, especially cases involving civil rights. The unexpected opportunity for the appointment of a conservative jurist caused great anxiety in the media and in the U.S. Senate, the later having confirmation power over presidential appointments to the Supreme Court. This article examines the consequences of the Senate's confirmation of Justice Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court. The impact, which was immediate and dramatic, indicates that conservative ideology will predominate on major civil rights issues for the remainder of this century.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (21) ◽  
pp. 97-160
Author(s):  
李順典 李順典

鑑於美國最高法院重新激活了專利適格性標的要件,其認為涉及發明的自然法則、自然現象或抽象概念,除非它們也包含「發明的概念」,否則不具專利適格性,因而引發了巨大爭議。因為新專利適格性原則不當削弱了美國在創新中的領導地位,而且它們已經給美國專利制度注入了巨大的法律不確定性,所以美國應重新思考生物技術產業創新的激勵措施生物技術公司的專利適格性在不同的國家面臨不斷的改變,故必須發展保護生物技術創新的全球策略,可行的發展策略應是根據國家的法律標準申請專利。In view of the United States Supreme Court has reinvigorated the patent-eligible subject matter requirement, holding that inventions directed to laws of nature, natural phenomena, or abstract ideas are not eligible for patenting unless they also contain an ''inventive concept.'' As a result, the Supreme Court has sparked tremendous controversy. Since the new patent eligibility doctrine is undermining U.S. leadership in innovation, so the U.S. shall reconsider the incentives for innovation in the biotechnologyindustry. Biotech companies facing constant changes in patent eligibility in different countries have to develop global strategies for protecting biotechnology innovations, and a recommended strategy is to file patent applications tailored to the legal standards of the countries of interest.


2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-855

On June 10, 2019, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in a case in which the D.C. Circuit held that the United States could continue to detain an individual at Guantánamo Bay until the cessation of the hostilities that justified his initial detention, notwithstanding the extraordinary length of the hostilities to date. The case, Al-Alwi v. Trump, arises from petitioner Moath Hamza Ahmed Al-Alwi's petition for a writ of habeas corpus challenging the legality of his continued detention at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court's denial of certiorari was accompanied by a statement by Justice Breyer observing that “it is past time to confront the difficult question” of how long a detention grounded in the U.S. response to the September 11 attacks can be justified.


10.12737/903 ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-81
Author(s):  
Владимир Сафонов ◽  
Vladimir Safonov

The article reveals the problem of applying the principle of the social state in the practice of the U.S. Supreme Court.


1998 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lori Fisler Damrosch

The U.S. Government’s position asserting nonjusticiability of the treaty claims raised by Paraguay in the domestic and international lawsuits is disturbing. The Government’s amicus filings at the court of appeals and the Supreme Court denied that Paraguay’s claims belonged in federal court (or indeed in any court at all); at die International Court of Justice, the United States admitted a treaty violation but denied the competence of that tribunal to enter a judicial remedy. At one or another phase of these proceedings, the U.S. Government pressed a variety of arguments that (if accepted) would rule out virtually any judicial consideration of a treaty-based claim. The haste with which the Supreme Court denied a stay in Breard’s case foreclosed adequate consideration of the justiciability of such claims in domestic courts and also effectively barred Paraguay from achieving the relief it sought on the international plane.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Dawood

This article re-examines the distinction between the libertarian approach and the egalitarian approach to the regulation of campaign finance. The conventional approach (as exemplified by the work of Owen Fiss and Ronald Dworkin) is to reconcile the competing values of liberty and equality. By contrast, this article advances the normative claim that democracies should seek to incorporate both the libertarian and the egalitarian approaches within constitutional law. I argue that instead of emphasizing one value over the other, the ideal position is one that simultaneously recognizes the values of liberty and equality despite the irreconcilable tension between them. Rather than choosing one value over the other, or reconciling these values by redefining them, I claim that it is vital to maintain the tension between liberty and equality by instantiating the conflict in law. Democracy is better served when the law contains an explicit tension between these foundational values.After setting forth this normative framework, I then apply it to the campaign finance decisions of the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada, respectively. I make two main claims. First, I argue that although the libertarian/egalitarian distinction is usually presented as a binary choice, the laws of a given jurisdiction often simultaneously display both libertarian and egalitarian characteristics. For this reason, I claim that the libertarian/egalitarian distinction is better conceived of as a “libertarian-egalitarian spectrum.” Second, I argue that in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Canada, respectively, have privileged one value—liberty or equality—at the expense of the other. The U.S. Supreme Court has over-emphasized the value of liberty (most notably in its Citizens United decision), with the result that political equality is markedly undermined. By the same token, the Supreme Court of Canada’s commitment to equality has become too one-sided in recent cases (Harper and Bryan), with the result that there are significant impairments to free speech liberties. I argue that both of these approaches are detrimental to democratic participation and governance. Finally, this article offers a preliminary proposal for how courts and legislatures can allow for the conflict between liberty and equality to be instantiated in law.


Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier

The epilogue examines the legacy of the efforts by Julius Chambers and his firm through the mid-1970s. In 1984, Chambers, widely acknowledged as an exceptionally skilled civil rights litigator and legal strategist, succeeded Jack Greenberg as director-counsel of Legal Defense and Education Fund. From that post Chambers coordinated the legal struggle for civil rights for nine years, mostly attempting to fend off the increasingly reactionary policies of the Reagan administration and of the legal positions on race advanced by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In 1993, Chambers resigned as LDF director-counsel and returned to North Carolina, where he was installed as chancellor of his undergraduate alma mater, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Chambers retired in 2001and, after an absence of nearly twenty years, returned to Charlotte where he rejoined the firm on a limited basis. He meanwhile served the inaugural director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, housed within the UNC Law School. Chambers, whose efforts advanced federal civil rights law to its apogee in the early to mid-1970s and who thus stands out as the most important African American civil rights attorney in the generation following Thurgood Marshall, died on August 2, 2013.


Author(s):  
Julian Maxwell Hayter

Chapter 3 describes how local African Americans, with the help of the U.S. Congress, federal courts, and the U.S. Department of Justice, instigated the reapportionment revolution after 1965. This revolution carried the spirit of civil rights reform, the Great Society, and President Lyndon Johnson’s equality-of-results standard well into the 1970s. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969) to expand the implications of the VRA’s preclearance clause in section 5, antidilution litigation began to flood America’s court system. African American public-housing resident Curtis Holt Sr. and white suburbanites eventually sued to deannex Chesterfield County, but for very different reasons. The white residents of the annexed area saw annexation as a way to continue passive resistance to school integration. Holt’s suit led the Supreme Court to place what became a seven-year moratorium on city council elections. This suit not only plugged Richmond into the Burger Court’s campaign against vote dilution but also eventually culminated in the implementation of Richmond’s majority–minority district system. Local politics in Richmond had national implications. Litigation (e.g., City of Richmond v. United States [1975]), the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice played a critical role in the monumental election of a black-majority council in Richmond in 1977.


Author(s):  
Robert A. Burt

The Supreme Court long considered its highest mission to be the protection of individual liberty from intrusion by government, but the court shifted its focus to social and economic equality. This book explores this shift and its implications, especially for the legal protection of the vulnerable. Crucial to the author's perspective is an unconventional view of the role of judges—not simply to decide disputes, but to promote a respectful dialogue leading to a genuine understanding between parties. The U.S. Constitution, through its interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court, deals with the protection of vulnerable people in American society. It focuses on the judge not as the sole determiner of equality or protection but as a leader who, through careful observation and guidance, promotes an interactive process among the parties in order to settle the matter in an empathic, mutually respectful way. The book points out that judges are not the only actors through whom democratic values founded on empathic mutual respect and accountability can be promoted. At the center of this study is the Civil Rights Act of 1968.


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