I’ve been reading the briefs in FCC v. Fox (petitioner, respondent, petitioner’s reply) and its been hard for me to take any of these suits seriously. They’ve tried with difficulty to codify profanity and ‘obscenity’ but perhaps Justice Douglas was right when he said pornography , My favorite balancing test came from Judge Level of [...]

The Supreme Court today granted cert. in FOX v. FCC, a case revolving around the use of ‘fleeting expletives’ on national TV. Jan Crawford Greenburg has some wonderful analysis on the case on her ABC blog here. She quoted from Miguel Estrada’s (yes, that one) brief for NBC and I just had to reproduce it [...]

The Washington Post had a article recently about the way in which more and more American’s are viewing the court as too conservative. 33% of Americans feel that the Court is too conservative and only 47% believe that the court is balanced. 55% of Americans agree with the court’s ruling in Carhart but 70% disagree [...]

Bill Posner (not Richard Posner) writes a rather interesting article about the now infamous banner at the center of Morse v. Fredrick over at his blog, Language Log. Posner contends that the Justices, especially the conservative ones, may have overanalyzed the banner in question by ignoring “the possibility that the utterance is meaningless.” By assuming [...]

Alongside Morse, the court handed down another highly controversial ruling along the standard partisan line. In Hein v. Freedom From Religion (discussed at length here), the Court ruled that taxpayer standing does not extend to establishment clause cases arising from appropriations made by the executive branch that were never explicitly authorized by Congress. To understand [...]

One of the cases that we’ve been looking forward too the most, Morse v. Fredrick, was decided today. By a vote of 6-3, the court held that Principal Deborah Morse was not acting unconstitutionally when she suppressed Fredrick’s right to hold up a banner that read ‘BONG HITS 4 JESUS.’ You can read my recap [...]