Free Republic

Florida's ban on marriages between same-sex couples is headed for a midnight end, with wedding vows planned around the state. A stay expires late Monday in a federal judge's ruling striking down the ban enacted in 2008 by voters. Several court clerks are planning to begin issuing....

December 19, 2014 JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS Recent Judicial Confirmations Put Obama Ahead of Predecessors This week, the Senate confirmed a dozen judicial nominees before the end of the “lame duck” session, reports Jennifer Bendery at The Huffington Post. “That puts Obama at a whopping 89 district court and circuit court confirmations for the year, and means he'll wrap up his sixth year in office with a grand total of 305 district court and circuit court confirmations -- a tally that puts him well beyond where his predecessors were by this point in their presidencies.” Many of these new judges will add...

An administrative law judge has ruled that a Kentucky printer’s refusal to print gay pride t-shirts “constitutes unlawful discrimination,” and, by extension, that printers cannot refuse to print materials promoting ideas they disagree with. Hands On Originals is a business that prints custom designs on clothes, accessories and other items like mugs and bottles. According to the ruling, Blaine Adamson, its managing owner, “instructed his sales representatives to decline to design, print, or produce orders whenever the requested material was perceived to promote an event or organization that conveys messages that are considered by the sales representative or Mr. Adamson...

U.S. Conference of Mayors had a 4-day conference that ended on Monday. More than 200 mayors participated in this gathering that took place in Dallas. The result of this was U.S. Conference of Mayors urging federal courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court to allow same-sex couples nationwide to marry. The same conference was held back in 2009, that time too it endorsed the freedom of same-sex couples to marry. The same thing it reaffirmed in this current resolution. The major noting of the group was that that 19 states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex couples to marry....

Editor's Note: Column was coauthored by Ken Klukowski. Justice John Paul Stevens doesn’t believe anyone has the right to own a gun, and admits that you would need to rewrite the Constitution to make his preference a legal reality. And that’s exactly what he thinks should happen. Throughout his 35-year tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens was a lion of the Legal Left. He was an unapologetic advocate of the “Living Constitution”— that judges should continually reinterpret the words of the Constitution in accordance with what they, and other elite members of society, decide is the evolving enlightenment of...

For five years, Senate Republicans have refused to allow confirmation votes on dozens of perfectly qualified candidates nominated by President Obama for government positions. They tried to nullify entire federal agencies by denying them leaders. They abused Senate rules past the point of tolerance or responsibility. And so they were left enraged and threatening revenge on Thursday when a majority did the only logical thing and stripped away their power to block the president’s nominees. Democrats made the filibuster change with a simple-majority vote, which Republicans insisted was a violation of the rules. There is ample precedent for this kind...

Bristol CT --(Ammoland.com)- During a closed door meeting in the judge’s chambers during a case Judge Robert C. “Brunes” Brunetti exposed his bigotry for fundamental civil rights in front of at least three defense attorneys. The violation came during the case of State of Connecticut v. Bruce Worley, docket number H17B-CR13-0055722S.Judge Brunetti expressed his contempt for the right to keep and bear arms, as spelled out in both the Second Amendment to the US constitution and Article 1, Section 15 of the Connecticut Constitution by stating in chambers that “No one in this country should have guns” and that he...

A federal appeals court on Friday rejected a legal challenge by Texas and Wyoming to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a 2-1 vote, said the states and various industry groups did not have standing to sue because they could not show that they had suffered an injury or that a ruling throwing out the EPA plan would benefit them. Texas and Wyoming objected in part to the tight deadlines the EPA imposed on them for coming up with...

Well, that was quick. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday evening ordered that same-sex marriages begin again in California, and after less than a day of weddings, Prop 8 advocates filed an emergency motion to halt the unions, claiming that they still had time to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision to dismiss their challenge to a 2010 ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Kennedy, who is responsible for motions dealing with the Ninth Circuit, was swift in his response. The Associated Press reports that he "turned away the request on Sunday with no additional...

Dissenting from this morning's opinion on the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Antonin Scalia – as expected – holds nothing back. In a ripping dissent, Scalia says that Justice Anthony Kennedy and his colleagues in the majority have resorted to calling opponents of gay marriage "enemies of the human race."

The U.S. Supreme Court today paved the way for same-sex couples to marry soon in California, effectively leaving intact a lower-court ruling that struck down the state's voter-approved ban on gay marriage. In a ruling that assures further legal battles, the high court found that backers of Proposition 8 did not have the legal right to defend the voter-approved gay marriage ban in place of the governor and attorney general, who have refused to press appeals of a federal judge's 2010 ruling finding the law unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruling, which found it had no legal authority to decide the...

Court Rules There Is No Right To Carry A Concealed Weapon Larry Bodine, Lawyers.comFebruary 25, 2013, 6:42 AM In a sweeping ruling, the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that there is no Second Amendment right to carry a concealed firearm in public. The broad wording of the decision in Peterson v. Martinez creates a far-reaching national precedent against carrying a loaded handgun outside the home. The case began on a narrow point – a challenge by a Washington State man against Colorado’s law to issue CHL permits (“Concealed Handgun License”) only to state residents. But the final ruling...

Court-appointed Republican poll inspectors are being forcibly removed from voting stations in some Philadelphia wards and replaced in some cases by Democratic inspectors and even members of the Black Panthers, according to GOP officials. Secrets just received this memo from GOP officials: The Philadelphia GOP is reporting that court appointed Minority (read GOP) Inspectors are being thrown out of polling locations in several Wards. These Inspectors are election officials - again, court appointed -- and are reportedly being thrown out by the Head Judges of Elections (these Judges are elected Democrats) and being replaced by Democrats. This has happened at...

We have some breaking news out of New York: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled on Windsor v. the United States, a case challenging Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, and found a federal definition of marriage as one man and one woman violates the U.S. Constitution. "[W]e conclude that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act violates equal protection and is therefore unconstitutional," they wrote. Our legal eagle Ari Ezra Waldman will have a full analysis soon.

Judge Vaughn Walker, the now-retired federal judge in San Francisco who nullified California’s Proposition 8 in 2010, said if judges really are umpires, they must sometimes “move the strike zone” in order to champion social issues like same-sex marriage. “Case by case, what judges do and must do is take account of the pitcher and the batter in the legal arena, watch the windup, the throw, the curve, and the delivery and then, where they believe appropriate, move the strike zone,” Walker wrote on Aug. 28 in the University of Illinois Law Review. But Walker, flouting Justice Antonin Scalia and...

Betrayal is hard to take, whether in our personal lives or in the political life of the nation. Yet there are people in Washington — too often, Republicans — who start living in the Beltway atmosphere, and start forgetting those hundreds of millions of Americans beyond the Beltway who trusted them to do right by them, to use their wisdom instead of their cleverness. President Bush 41 epitomized these betrayals when he broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. He paid the price when he quickly went from high approval ratings as president to someone defeated for...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday upheld the first-ever U.S. proposed rules governing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, clearing a path for sweeping regulations affecting vehicles, coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. Handing a setback to industry and a victory to the Obama administration, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that carbon dioxide is a public danger and the decision to set limits for emissions from cars and light trucks were "neither arbitrary nor capricious." The ruling, which addresses four separate lawsuits, upholds the underpinnings of the...

In the Lowe case, news stories said, a thug named Loren Manning Jr., accompanied by two other thugs, jumped Lowe on a city street last October. Lowe, 57, is a disabled and retired Marine, who has had two strokes and two heart surgeries and wears a pacemaker. Manning and his sidekicks attacked Lowe and witnesses said Manning chased him and tried to clobber him with a metal pole before catching him and pinning him to the ground, where Lowe managed to retrieve a small pocket knife and used it to stick Manning, who, tragically, died. This is Philadelphia, mind you,...

FULL TITLE: Honour student who works two jobs to support her siblings after her parents split up and left town is put in JAIL for missing school due to exhaustion. Devastated: Diane Tran, 17, has a criminal record and spent a night in jail after being charged with truancy. She works two jobs to support her family Abandoned: Her parents divorced 'out of the blue' and left Tran and her two siblings to fend for themselves Ms Tran said she works a full time job, a part-time job, and takes advancement and dual credit college level courses at Willis High...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- A federal judge in Austin has stopped Texas from banning Planned Parenthood from participating in the state's Women's Health Program. Judge Lee Yeakel ruled Monday there is sufficient evidence the state law is unconstitutional. He imposed an injunction against.... The law passed last year by the Republican-controlled Legislature forbids state agencies from providing funds to an organization affiliated with abortion providers.