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Looking Beyond Sotomayor
A funny thing happened between January’s Obamamania and July’s celebrity death-fest this year: the Supreme Court became A-1, radio banter-worthy news. It may have been because of a sudden and pressing interest in federalism and the intricacies of originalism. More likely, it was a certain baseball-saving New Yorker who promised, if not to shake up the Court that much ideologically, at least to pack more interesting bag lunches than the departing Justice Souter.
But while America sat watching clips of Judge Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” speech on YouTube, the Supreme Court spring term happened. Interspersed with mind-numbing procedural issues of regulation and statutory language were cases that held well-known civil and criminal rights precedents —involving due process, voting rights and discrimination — under a microscope.
Not unexpectedly, the case with which the public was probably most familiar was the New Haven firefighters’ discrimination lawsuit. Sotomayor was the story here, too, …
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Uighurs Caught Between a Rock, a Hard Place and Congress
The four Uighurs who splashed in the Bahama sea on the front page of the New York Times last month, after their release from Guantanamo, left the impression that what awaited the other 13 Uighur detainees — also deemed no terrorist threat to the U.S.— were sandy beaches, pineapples, and no future concerns more serious than swimmer’s ear.
In reality, the Uighurs left imprisoned at Guantanamo remain caught in the middle of a legal wrangle involving all three branches of government, an impasse which appears less likely to find quick resolution after this Monday’s declaration by the Supreme Court that it will delay any action on the Uighur’s petition for release until at least September.
Congress, the Obama administration, and the D.C. courts have been circling one another for the past year, each branch with a distinct view of the detainees’ predicament and each eager to criticize one …
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For Now, Voting Rights Act Survives
A case that was seen as one of the most important voting rights cases in recent years came to an anticlimax Monday, surprising many who had anticipated — or feared — that a major provision of the Voting Rights Act would be struck down.
The Court sidestepped the constitutionality of the VRA’s preclearance requirement to decide the case based on the fact that Texas’s Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District and other districts like it are, indeed, political subdivisions that could “bail out” and release themselves from the requirement.
Uncertain now, though, is what the Court’s decision signals for the future legality of the VRA and how Congress will respond to preserve the Act.
University of Michigan law professor Ellen Katz said that she had believed after a tense oral argument in April that the Court would toss out the entire section of the Act under question. …
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It's Hard Out There For a Plaintiff
The Supreme Court’s decision to make it more difficult for employees to win age discrimination suits continues a streak of defendant-friendly (read: business and institution-friendly) rulings in discrimination cases this term. After having made it harder to sue top officials who enact discriminatory policies and preventing women from claiming compensation for pregnancy leave taken before 1978, the Court decided 5-4 that employees claiming that they were discriminated against because of their age must always show that their age was the one deciding factor in their firing or demotion. Needless to say, definitive proof of an employer’s motive (a Post-It reading “To do: fire the old guy” might do) is usually hard to come by.
We’ll see whether plaintiff Frank Ricci has better luck in his suit against the city of New Haven – and, if so, what’s different in that case. It could be decided as early as …
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Are City and State Gun Laws Legit?
A week ago, a Federal appeals court in Illinois politely declined to extend the Heller decision — the one that sent D.C.’s handgun ban the way of the poll tax — to states and municipalities. The court relied on the idea that local gun laws will, and should, differ depending on whether guns in a given community are more likely to yield a tasty venison burger or a plea of involuntary manslaughter. In the words of Judge Easterbrook, “The Constitution establishes a federal republic where local differences are to be cherished as elements of liberty rather than extirpated in order to produce a single, nationally applicable rule.” Basically, stay out of our city councils.
Before you could say “well-armed militia,” the NRA appealed the case to the Supreme Court, who will likely hear it next fall. The petition takes issue with Chicago’s handgun ban. And the fact that guns must …
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