Tag: SCOTUS
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SCOTUS Confirmation Hearing
AboveTheLaw brings a little humor to Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing by providing her top five quotes of day two. My favorite part? Lindsey Graham wanted to know how Elena Kagan felt about the war on terror (or “terra,” in his heavy Southern accent). He asked her where she was on Christmas day, when a would-be…
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Citizens United v. FEC: SCOTUS says corporations have free speech rights, too
Today, the Supreme Court issued a long-awaited ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, the case about “Hillary: the Movie” that decided whether restrictions upon corporate financing of political advertising impermissibly infringed upon the first amendment rights of those corporations. The 5-4 decision upheld the disclosure and disclaimer portions of the campaign finance law for corporate-financed…
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The Voting Rights Act survives, for now
In a decision that virtually no court watchers saw coming, the U.S. Supreme Court today dispensed with the constitutional challenge to the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act by, in essence, creating a technicality. Back when this case was argued before SCOTUS, most readers of tea leaves believed that the Justices’ questions to counsel…
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Taking over for Dr. Tiller
Nebraska abortion provider LeRoy Carhart, M.D. said today that he intends to provide late-second trimester and third trimester abortions to Kansas patients that would previously have been only able to seek such procedures from the recently murdered Dr. George Tiller. Much like Dr. Tiller, Dr. Carhart has fought a valiant and dangerous legal and personal…
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The ethics of elected judges
This morning the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that could have huge impact here in Georgia and in every state in which judges are elected. In a story that could be straight out of a John Grisham novel, a West Virginia coal company lost a case at trial to the tune of $50 million. The coal company’s…