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.

The Supreme Court on Church and State

Abstract: In revising and updating Joseph Tussman's The Supreme Court on Church and State, Robert Alley has collected the major Supreme Court decisions on the separation of church and state to provide a comprehensive and non-partisan guide to the Court's opinions. Cases are presented in their entirety, with many essential dissenting opinions, and cover a representative sample of significant issues. With a historical introduction and a chart of Supreme Court Justices's votes, this book is an important reference on a timely subject.

Higher First Amendment Hurdles for Public Health Regulation

Abstract: The Supreme Court's recent ruling that drug marketing using prescriber-identifiable prescription data is protected speech under the First Amendment raises serious questions for some public health rules and the regulation of drug marketing.

Special Education Tuition Reimbursement Claims: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract: The ability of parents of children with disabilities to seek reimbursement for private school tuition is one of the most controversial aspects of special education law. Using a comprehensive sample of published court and hearing officer decisions regarding tuition reimbursement, this study, expanding on previous research, quantified the frequency and outcomes of tuition reimbursement disputes. It revealed that the annual average number of such claims has increased over time. It also demonstrated that there was a significant difference in case outcomes between the administrative and judicial forums, but there was no significant difference in case outcomes among the successive time periods marked by two U.S. Supreme Court decisions on tuition reimbursement (i.e., Burlington School Committee v. Department of Educ. (1985), Florence County School District Four v. Carter (1993)) and, most recently, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1997.

Assisted Suicide, the Supreme Court, and the Constitutive Function of the Law

Abstract: It is not difficult to compose a brief summary of the Supreme Court's assisted suicide decisions that would be suitable for bar review study guides and law student outlines: With no dissenters, the Court overturned the decisions of the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts that conferred Fourteenth Amendment protection upon the choice of competent, terminally ill adults to end their own lives with medication prescribed by their physicians. (1) Holding that the Constitution does not protect a right to commit suicide that itself entails a right to assistance in committing the act, the majority opinions relegate assisted suicide and euthanasia to the "laboratory of the states." (2) However, the decisions leave open the ill-defined possibility that the Court might revisit the issue, particularly if presented with a more narrowly focused claim than the one vindicated by the two circuit courts. Such a description would probably enable recent law school graduates correctly to answer a multiple choice bar exam question on "whether there is a constitutional right to die." But grasping their "bottom line" is not the same as grappling with the power of the two decisions to shape our society's ongoing debate about the neuralgic ethical and legal questions entangled in end-of-life decisionmaking. As legal theorist and literary critic James Boyd White has taught us, courts do not simply issue abstract judgments that impersonally and mechanically guide the behavior of individual and institutional agents in our society. According to White, those who play a role in the legal enterprise are engaged in a type of "constitutive rhetoric" that actually helps shape the moral identity of the community in which they participate. The community-constituting character of law does not inhere solely in the results that issue in particular cases, but also in the very way the questions are framed for decision. A lawyer arguing a client's position, and a fartiori a judge rendering an opinion, "is always saying not only 'Here is how this case should be decided,' but also 'Here--in this language--is the way this case and similar cases should be talked about. The language I am speaking is the proper language of justice in our culture.'" (3) Assuming that White is correct, if we are to understand the full import of the Supreme Court decisions on assisted suicide, we cannot fix our gaze solely on the conclusions they reach. We must also scrutinize the way the justices frame the issues at stake, the communal hopes and fears they invoke, the modes of argument they find persuasive and those that they discount, and the particular words and phrases through which they convey all of those things. By exercising the authority to interpret the constitutive document of our nation that has ultimately rested in their hands since the Court decided Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the justices inevitably wield a tremendous power of moral formation. In effect, they are moral teachers who help to shape the character of our nation. White reminds us that the "habit of regarding law as the instrument by which 'we' effectuate 'our policies' and get what 'we want' is wholly inadequate. It is the true nature of law to constitute a 'we' and to establish a conversation by which that 'we' can determine what our 'wants' are and should be" (p. 42). How, then, do the opinions in Glucksberg (4) and Quill (5) refocus the discussion regarding our communal obligations to the persons in our midst who are confronting the momentous and often terrifying task of relinquishing their earthly existence? In what follows, I would like to examine three issues on which these decisions are likely to exert significant pedagogical influence: (1) the tension between general rules or classifications and the particular needs of individuals; (2) the relationship among pain, dignity, and equality; and (3) the limits of philosophical theory and the importance of practical experience. Equality, Rules, and Exceptions The opinion of the Court in Glucksberg communicates its most significant moral lesson in the way that it frames the legal claim at stake. …

Southern State Supreme Courts and Race Relations

Abstract: A EADING CHARACTERISTIC of the American political process is the frequent participation of courts in policy-making. The dramatic decisions of the Supreme Court are familiar landmarks in the literature of political history, but much less familiar are the decisions made by lower federal courts and by the state and local courts. While we have a good estimate of the impact of Supreme Court decisions in the political process, the political significance of the cases decided in other courts is largely unknown. Each year thousands of cases are decided in the lower federal courts and in the hundreds of state and local courts. Undoubtedly a major portion of these decisions, like the majority of the bills passed in Congress and in the state legislatures, has little political importance. But lack of knowledge of decision-making in the lower federal and the state and local courts makes difficult any assessment of the roles of these courts in their respective political systems. We cannot generalize our knowledge concerning the Supreme Court, necessarily, to the operation of other courts. Judges in lower courts may not follow the same patterns of behavior; lower courts may not make decisions according to similar judicial procedures nor fulfill the same functions in the political system. While other courts may be subject to some of the same legal influences that affect the Supreme Court, they clearly are involved with political factors in their peculiar environments. Neither can we generalize our knowledge of other political institutions such as the legislature to the operation of courts. Such factors as training in legal values, the distinctive methods of recruitment of officials to the courts, and the varied degrees of insulation of the courts from the political system emphasize that we must accumulate concepts and knowledge appropriate to courts and court officials to increase our knowledge of the judiciary. Although the literature of political science has described mainly the role of national courts (especially the Supreme Court), state and local courts undoubtedly also make decisions of political import; for they all have much the same potential for affecting policy outcomes. Not only can they exercise judicial review and extensively interpret statutes and constitutions, but they are easily accessible for lobbying by litigation. State courts in the state political process, like courts on the national level, provide points of access at which opinions and pressures may be presented, and at which societal values may be maintained and social changes resisted or facilitated. Furthermore, interest stymied elsewhere in the political process may turn to the state courts.