Supreme Court Decisions

About: Supreme Court Decisions is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1804 publications have been published within this topic receiving 17066 citations.

An Overview of Recent U.S. Supreme Court Jurisprudence in Patent Law

Abstract: This report provides a brief summary of the Supreme Court's patent law jurisprudence in the following nine cases that have been decided since 2005: Merck KGaA v. Integra Lifesciences I, Unitherm Food Systems v. Swift-Eckrich, Illinois Tool Works v. Independent Ink, eBay v. MercExchange, Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Metabolite Labs., MedImmune v. Genentech, KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., Microsoft v. AT&T, Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., and Bilski v. Kappos.

Recent Legal Developments Scott v. Harris: Seeing Is Believing

Abstract: This article provides an assessment of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Scott v. Harris (2007). The assessment provides students, criminal justice scholars, and practitioners with an overview o...

Authorial Control of the Supreme Court

Abstract: The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court authors many of the most important opinions coming out of the Court. The prestige of authoring an important policy decision, and the value that such an opinion adds to the legacy of the Chief Justice’s Court, plays an important and strategic role in the Court’s opinion authorship dynamics and the policy outcomes of the Court. We present a Supreme Court decision-making model that, within the confines of legal doctrine, incorporates the authorship utility of the Chief Justice (and senior associate justices who hold secondary, yet important, property rights over authorship). New predictions emerge about who authors the Court’s opinion, what case outcome is chosen by the justices, which legal doctrines are chosen, and which decisions are unanimous among the justices. We illustrate aspects of the model with recent Supreme Court decisions involving health care and campaign financing.

Policing from the Gut: Anti-Intellectualism in American Criminal Procedure

Abstract: Over the last thirty years, the Supreme Court of the United States has given police increased power to search and seize practically anyone they wish. In many of the Supreme Court decisions that have helped create this sweeping power, the Court built its reasoning on premises and rhetoric that can be described as anti-intellectual, revealing an antipathy to thinking--where, it turns out, the thinking is about how to protect civil liberties. The Court has concluded that, in some investigatory contexts, police need not think about a suspect's civil liberties but instead may go ahead and search, seize, or interrogate. Thinking about civil liberties, the Court has said, could lead to inaction by police that could possibly result in a failure to discover evidence or to detain a person who might be dangerous. But when police are not required to think, courts are not required to do so either; indeed, under the rulings in these cases, courts are barred from ever considering claims by some people who are searched or arrested unnecessarily or even based on improper police motives. The Court does not address this danger to civil liberties directly but disparages thinking in general, using anti-intellectual language.This Article identifies some of these cases - including Illinois v. Gates, which lowered the probable cause standard; Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, which gave police discretion to arrest people who commit minor traffic offenses; and the 2008 case Virginia v. Moore, which extended this broad arrest power to cases in which state law prohibits arrest - and examines the Court's reasoning and rhetoric.Anti-intellectualism pervades American culture, as was examined famously almost five decades ago by Richard Hofstadter in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Anti-intellectualism in American Life. If anything, this antipathy toward reflection has actually increased in recent years. It is no surprise, then, that anti-intellectualism would affect our criminal procedure jurisprudence. What is surprising is that this effect has gone largely unnoticed. This Article will show that the reasoning in these Supreme Court opinions is inapt and tendentious, and that in the situations where the Court asserts it would be too difficult for police to think about civil liberties, it actually is not. The tendency of the Court of not requiring police to think about civil liberties has allowed the police to decide based on gut feeling - which sometimes involves racial or other animus - who ultimately will receive criminal sanctions. Indeed, in the past thirty years, the criminal justice system has disproportionately ensnared the poor and minorities. The cases rooted in anti-intellectualism have undermined the rule of law and respect for citizens, and they have promoted inaccuracy in criminal investigations by permitting police to indulge racial and cultural animus at the expense of meaningful investigation of crime. This Article will argue that these cases should be reexamined and that police and courts should be required to consider civil liberties.