Nebraska Supreme Court strikes down anti-gay foster parent rule. State of Nebraska Judicial Branch In 1995, Nebraska issued the notorious Memo 1-95, which prohibited same-sex couples from fostering children. The policy barred same-sex couples from adopting children as well; under state law, individuals may adopt kids from state care only if they have first been licensed as foster parents—which Memo 1-95 made impossible for “persons who identify themselves as homosexuals.” In 2013, three same-sex couples, represented by the ACLU and Sullivan & Cromwell, filed a lawsuit alleging that the ban violated of their constitutional rights. They won in 2015 when a district court found that Memo 1-95 violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. Nebraska appealed to the state Supreme Court. It didn’t attempt to defend its ban on constitutional grounds.
Instead, it argued that the three couples did not have standing to sue because they hadn’t yet been denied foster care licenses. Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate.
The Supreme Court . The Future of the Court. The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade. Steve Petteway/ Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear its first abortion case in nine years. At issue in Whole Woman's Health v. Cole is HB 2, an omnibus Texas abortion law that made national headlines in 2013 after Texas Sen. Wendy Davis spent 11-hours filibustering the bill that eventually passed anyway. Since 1992, the court has ruled on three abortion cases, each time affirming further abortion restrictions. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a divided court upheld the right to abortion, but left it to the states to set abortion restrictions, saying that these regulations can't put an "undue burden" on abortion access. "The Court now has the opportunity to decide whether we will continue to allow elected officials to play politics with women's health.
" The Supreme Court has intervened on HB 2 twice before. The court has not yet announced whether it will also take Jackson Women's Health Organization v.
Justice Scalia explained why Kim Davis should issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples or find a new job. Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis tells a same-sex couple hoping to be married that she is not issuing marriage licenses "under God's authority. " (Hillary Thornton/WKYT-TV) Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Ky., refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because she believes same-sex marriage is immoral. According to Davis, her religious convictions prevent her from issuing the license: “To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience.” In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. No justice publicly dissented from the Supreme Court’s denial of Davis’s plea for relief, and this was not surprising. Davis has a right to observe and adhere to her religious beliefs, but she does not have a right to her job as county clerk.
[Editorial: Kim Davis has to follow the law or find new work] Davis is in a similar position. Think of it this way. Jonathan H. California Consequences: What If High Court Bans Race Preferences in College Admissions? Almost lost amid the recent flurry of marquee U.S. Supreme Court rulings—including one endorsing same-sex marriage and another upholding Obamacare—was a judicial move that could have a huge impact on who gets into top colleges. The justices, by opting to reconsider a case that challenges the University of Texas’s use of race and ethnicity to select students, signaled that they may be ready to effectively end affirmative action in college admissions nationwide. To do so would be to follow California’s example: Nearly two decades ago, voter-approved Prop. 209 made it the first of a handful of states to explicitly bar public universities from considering any applicant’s race or ethnicity in admissions.
That clarifies how Texas wound up with a more “progressive” university admissions policy than California. At first glance, it might seem that California, given its existing affirmative action ban, would be unaffected regardless of what the court decides in Fisher v. Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc. :: 390 U.S. 400 (1968) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., 390 U.S. 400 (1968) Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc.
No. 339 Argued March 7, 1968 Decided March 18, 1968 Syllabus One who succeeds in obtaining an injunction under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should ordinarily recover an attorney's fee under § 204(b) unless special circumstances would render such an award unjust, and should not be limited, as the Court of Appeals held, to an award of counsel fees only if the defenses advanced were "for purposes of delay, and not in good faith. " 377 F.2d 433, modified and affirmed. The petitioners instituted this class action under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, § 204(a), 78 Stat. 244, 42 U.S.C. § 2000a-3(a), to enjoin racial discrimination at five drive-in restaurants and a sandwich shop owned and operated by the respondents in South Carolina. Page 390 U. Racial discrimination only at the respondents' sandwich shop. Page 390 U. Page 390 U. Affirmed. MR. [Footnote 1] 42 U.S.C. § 2000a-3(b). How Hobby Lobby Undermined The Very Idea of a Corporation.
Justice Alito signs his oath card in the Justices Conference RoomKen Heinen/AP Here's one more reason to worry about the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision, which allowed the arts and crafts chain to block insurance coverage of contraception for female employees because of the owners' religious objections: It could screw up corporate law. This gets complicated, but bear with us. Basically, what you need to know is that if you and some friends start a company that makes a lot of money, you'll be rich, but if it incurs a lot of debt and fails, you won't be left to pay its bills. The Supreme Court affirmed this arrangement in a 2001 case, Cedric Kushner Promotions vs. Don King: linguistically speaking, the employee and the corporation are different “persons,” even where the employee is the corporation’s sole owner. That separation is what legal and business scholars call the "corporate veil," and it's fundamental to the entire operation.
Justice Stevens: Supreme Court has Misinterpreted the Second Amendment. The Washington Post has published an opinion piece from Justice John Paul Stevens in which he analyzes the history of the second amendment, and recent Supreme Court decisions to support his contention that the interpretation of the Second Amendment advanced by the NRA (and recently accepted by the courts) is contrary to the intent of the framers. According to Stevens: For more than 200 years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways: First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Stevens then goes on to explain how the recent decisions of District of Columbia v.
Stevens treats the NRA very harshly. Official California Legislative Information. CAL. GOV. CODE § 54956 : California Code - Section 54956. (a) A special meeting may be called at any time by the presiding officer of the legislative body of a local agency, or by a majority of the members of the legislative body, by delivering written notice to each member of the legislative body and to each local newspaper of general circulation and radio or television station requesting notice in writing and posting a notice on the local agency's Internet Web site, if the local agency has one. The notice shall be delivered personally or by any other means and shall be received at least 24 hours before the time of the meeting as specified in the notice. The call and notice shall specify the time and place of the special meeting and the business to be transacted or discussed. No other business shall be considered at these meetings by the legislative body.
The call and notice shall be posted at least 24 hours prior to the special meeting in a location that is freely accessible to members of the public. Precedent for contraception coverage.
Free Speech Rights of Government Employees. Marriage equality state by state. The following piece for our same-sex marriage symposium is by William Eskridge, the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School. He is the author of The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (1996), and dozens of other books and articles arguing for the civil rights of sexual and gender minorities. How ought the U.S. Supreme Court handle the appeal in Perry v. Schwarzenegger once the case is ripe for appeal? In 1956, political scientist Robert Dahl warned that pluralistic democracy cannot easily handle issues that both intensely and evenly divide the polity. Add same-sex marriage as an issue that now divides the country both intensely and evenly"”and is therefore an issue that ought not be resolved one way or the other until public preferences become more settled.
As I wrote fifteen years ago, in The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (1996), the legal case for such a constitutional right is an excellent one. What does this mean for a future Supreme Court appeal in Perry? Religion in the Public Schools - Teachers' Religious Expression.