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.

Korematsu and Beyond: Japanese Americans and the Origins of Strict Scrutiny

Abstract: I INTRODUCTION The story of the United States Supreme Court's epochal 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1) and the legal struggle for civil rights led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the decade following World War II occupies a central place in many Americans' understanding both of the history of democracy in the United States and of the African American experience. Under the direction of Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund and allied attorneys brought a series of civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Its campaign culminated triumphantly in Brown and its companion case Bolling v. Sharpe, (2) in which the Court struck down school segregation. It was in the Bolling case that the Court clearly and definitively established its doctrine of "strict scrutiny." According to this doctrine, race was a "suspect classification" under the Constitution, meaning that the Court would subject any action by the government that involved a racial classification to a searching examination, rather than assume its constitutionality, and that it would hold the action to be unconstitutional unless it served a compelling state interest and was narrowly tailored to meet that interest. The Court's doctrine of strict scrutiny removed the constitutional underpinnings of Jim Crow and thus paved the way for its subsequent civil rights decisions during the 1960s. One crucial element of the story of Brown v. Board of Education and the battle for black equality has been obscured in the popular narrative: the role of the Nisei, U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, in the legal struggle leading up to Brown. The Nisei contribution took different forms: For example, lawyers for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) consulted on different occasions with NAACP counsel on the preparation of civil rights cases before the Supreme Court and lower courts, and the JACL participated in these cases as amicus curiae. Beyond the force of their arguments, the presence of the Nisei alongside African Americans served a powerful symbolic function, particularly in the decade following their mass wartime removal and incarceration (commonly called the Japanese American internment). It operated to remind both judges and the nation that racial prejudice was not simply a "black problem," but a complex phenomenon of global dimensions, and of the dangerous consequences of race-based legislation. However, the most decisive contribution of the Japanese Americans to the legal struggle for civil rights was in laying the foundation for the doctrine of strict scrutiny on which Brown and the other cases were based. The doctrine was developed in significant part from principles first enunciated in the cases involving Japanese American challenges to their wartime incarceration. These principles were then elaborated and reinforced immediately after World War II in a set of cases brought by the JACL concerning the rights of Japanese Americans to live and work free of discriminatory restrictions. In the years that followed, the NAACP built upon these cases in its fight against segregation, and the Court finally absorbed and explicitly enshrined the principles first enunciated in those cases. II THE WARTIME JAPANESE AMERICAN CASES A. Hirabayashi v. United States The story of Japanese Americans and strict scrutiny begins with Hirabayashi v. United States (3) and Korematsu v. United States. (4) In these cases, the Court justified its upholding of race-based restrictions on American citizens of Japanese ancestry on the grounds of the exceptional demands of wartime military necessity. In the case of Hirabayashi and its companion case Yasui v. United States, (5) the Court sanctioned a special curfew for Japanese Americans. Engaging in some judicial hairsplitting, the Court considered this question separately from the mass removal and confinement that followed, which it refused to address. …

Temporary Appointments and Judicial Independence: Theoretical Thoughts and Empirical Findings from the Supreme Court of Israel

Abstract: A debate has emerged in recent years within the law and economics movement and beyond with regard to the positive analysis of the independence of the judiciary. The traditional approach to the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary constructs a positive analysis on the basis of a normative analysis. According to this approach independent judiciary is viewed as a demonopolizing factor, as a mechanism for diminishing agency costs and as a method of increasing the costs of rent-seeking activity and decreasing the profits of interest groups. The revisionist approach views the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary as mechanisms, which help politicians to maximize their utility. One of the features of judicial independence in Israel, of which Israeli scholars are proud of, is the procedure for appointment and promotion of judges. However, temporary appointments can bypass this procedure. A practice, according to which one to two judges on a temporary appointment serve at the Supreme Court has characterized the Court's work almost from its establishment in 1948. Most of these appointments function as a testing period. It is difficult to say that during this "probationary" period the temporary judges enjoy real structural independence. The Paper, using statistical data from about 50,000 Israeli Supreme Court decisions, examines whether the patterns of decision-making of the temporary judges is significantly different from those of the tenured judges. Some of the tested variables are the rate of decisions against the government, the rate of dissenting opinions and the rate of reversal of lower courts decision and more. I also examine which decision-making patterns tend to increase the chances for a full appointment. The findings are strikingly similar to findings from an earlier research of mine on The English Court of Appeal judges and their promotion to the House of Lords chances vis-a-vis judicial decision-making patterns in public law cases. Both studies tend to support the revisionist approach towards judicial independence and can contribute to the positive analysis of the independence of the judiciary.

The Supreme Court Decision in the Hobby Lobby Case: Conscience, Complicity, and Contraception

Abstract: This publication examines the broad implications the United States Supreme Court's holding in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby et al. could have on medical care. The Court in Hobby Lobby held the company could sue for an exemption from the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act on grounds that it was a substantial burden on the company's exercise of religious freedom. The reasoning in Hobby Lobby could extend beyond insurance and parallels to debates over "conscience-based" refusals to prescribe or dispense contraceptives. There is concern that companies may use this same logic to discriminate in the name of religion against same-sex spouses with regard to benefit packages; employers may object to state-mandated coverage of in vitro fertilization; and physicians may be able to withhold information from a patient under a religion based moral objection. Evidence shows the most effective methods of contraception that will lead to fewer unintended pregnancies, and thus, fewer abortions is access to the most effective methods of contraception. Hobby Lobby may well be driving its female employees to less effective methods of contraception, leading to more unintended pregnancies and pregnancy terminations. By its own logic, Hobby Lobby may now become complicit in those additional abortions.

Chemically contaminated casualties: different problems and possible solutions.

Abstract: Novel H1N1 influenza virus infected more than 43,000 people, killed 353 and spread to more than 122 countries within a few months. The World Health Organization declared a stage 6 worldwide pandemic. Healthcare workers and hospitals prepared for the worst. Federal and State regulations provided the legal framework to allow for the preparation and planning for a pandemic. One State had mandated both seasonal and Novel H1N1 vaccination of all healthcare workers in an effort to reduce transmission of influenza in healthcare facilities. The US Supreme Court decided in 1905 that the police power of the State permitted a State Department of Health the leeway to mandate vaccination in the face of a contagious disease. Law suits were filed, and a temporary injunction barring mandatory vaccination was entered by the court. While awaiting a court hearing, the mandatory vaccination regulation was rescinded because of the shortage of both seasonal and H1N1 vaccine. Based on the current state of the pandemic and the shortage of vaccination, it is possible that the US Supreme Court would uphold mandatory vaccination in a pandemic.

The future of gene patents and the implications for medicine

Abstract: The Supreme Court decision in Myriad Genetics struck down the patenting of human genomic DNA. What will this mean for genetic testing and medicine, more broadly?