The Supreme Court granted review in three cases this morning, including a challenge to the Federal government’s ban on the distribution of videos involving animal cruelty in US v. Stevens. Volokh has a great discussion of the issues at play here. Thanks to SCOTUSblog, we have access to the cert petitions. Opinion Below Cert. Petition [...]

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 [...]

On March 31, the Court accepted cert. in Pleasant Grove v. Summum. The case revolves around the right of a Summum group to erect a monument of the Seven Aphorisms in a City Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah that already has a similarly-sized monument to the Ten Commandments. A park in Pleasant Grove, Utah features [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Well, the Court handed down a marginally interesting ruling on Monday in Schriro v. Landrigan. On a 5-4 vote, the Court overruled the Ninth Circut and held that a man who had rejected any mitigating evidence in favor of him during his trial is not subject to an evidentiary hearing and federal habeus review. Justice [...]

Well, I’m getting a little bored with the latest opinions to come down from the Court, so lets look at one that is coming up. In Morse v. Fredrick the Court is asked to rule on whether or not Fredrick’s right to hold up a sign that reads BONG HITS 4 JESUS is deserving of [...]

It recently came to my attention that the Texas legislature is considering legislation to require Texas high schools to offer Bible study classes in schools in which there are at least 15 students interested in the class. As usual, this ill-conceived piece of legislation is authored by Representative Warren Chisum. Assuming (major assumption) that the [...]