Free Republic

Speaking of law professors at the University of California at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Times reported this morning that ... Obama will nominate Professor Goodwin Liu to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a school district's refusal to let a band play a religious piece at a high school graduation, saying the superintendent had reasonably decided to avoid a constitutional controversy by ordering a secular program. The district's veto of an instrumental version of "Ave Maria" by German composer Franz Biebl at the 2006 graduation ceremony in Everett, Wash., did not violate students' freedom of speech or religion, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Ashcroft liable for detentions, court finds By Tony Romm - 09/04/09 04:18 PM ET Former Attorney General John Ashcroft may be sued and held liable for wrongly detaining witnesses after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. In its decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Abdullah Al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen detained as a material witness for two weeks, may sue the former attorney general for breaching his constitutional rights. Al-Kidd claimed during the case that his brief imprisonment caused him to lose a scholarship and crippled his chances of finding employment, according...

In a ruling with broad implications for computer privacy, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that federal investigators went too far when they seized the digital records of a drug testing company and kept the results of confidential drug tests performed on all Major League baseball players during the 2002 season. According to published reports, 104 players tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The names of four of them — Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, and (now retired) Sammy Sosa — were leaked to the press by an anonymous source or sources. The court...

The federal appeals court ruling against the government Wednesday in the long running Major League Baseball drug-testing case has several far-reaching ramifications. The decision means that leaking the names of steroid-tainted players to Sports Illustrated and The New York Times likely constituted crimes, and that an investigation could be launched to identify the leakers. It also means that the blockbuster revelations about steroid cheating by Alex Rodriguez(notes), Sammy Sosa(notes), Manny Ramirez(notes) and David Ortiz(notes) were based on evidence gathered in an illegal search by lead BALCO investigating agent Jeff Novitzky. Unless the Ninth Circuit decision is successfully appealed to the...

(IStockPhoto) A federal appeals court on September 24 will hear a high-profile gun rights case that's a leading candidate to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to decide whether the Second Amendment's guarantee of a right to "keep and bear arms" restricts only the federal government -- the current state of affairs -- or whether it can be used to strike down intrusive state and local laws too. A three-judge panel ruled that the Second Amendment does apply to the states. But now a larger Ninth Circuit panel will rehear...

<p>SAN FRANCISCO -- A Northern California family whose daughter underwent forced circumcision in Indonesia is entitled to seek political asylum in the United States, a federal appeals court said Monday.</p> <p>The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco criticized immigration officials who, in ordering the family deported, decided that the girl had suffered no serious harm when her genitals were mutilated as a newborn.</p>

A panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco today overturned a lower court ruling that put a halt to a controversial lawsuit concerning extraordinary rendition, the practice of flying suspected terrorists to their home (or other) countries. Click here for the story, from the San Jose Mercury News; here for the AP story. The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU on behalf of five men who say they were subjected to the government’s extraordinary rendition program — that they were kidnapped and sent to overseas prisons where they were tortured. The...

It may seem utterly impossible, but a fairly decent ruling regarding the Second Amendment came from a California court this week. The San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals actually ruled that private citizens can challenge state and local gun laws under the Second Amendment. Jokingly referred to as the Ninth “Circus” Court of Appeals for its historically horrendous opinions (it’s one of the most overturned appeals court in the nation), it is stunning to read the majority opinions in the case, Nordyke v. King. The majority opinions read more like a historical chronology of gun rights produced by...

WASHINGTON — The last time a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress banned civilian sales of military-style assault weapons, it took American voters just seven weeks to rebel. They handed Republicans control of the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. One of the casualties in the backlash was Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Beaumont, who sponsored the ban and then promptly lost his seat in Congress in 1994 after 42 years of service. The lesson wasn’t lost on President Obama when Mexican President Felipe Calderon suggested reviving the defunct weapons’ ban to help combat drug cartel violence...

Believe it or not, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled today that the second amendment restricts the right powers of state and local governments to interfere with the individual right to gun ownership. The decison even observes that the right to bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Notes Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro, "I rarely get a chance to say this, but the Ninth Circuit gets it exactly right." On a related matter, I just got around to Brian Doherty's Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment. It's a terrific accounting...

America, Liberty has won the day today! Our Civil Rights, as stated in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution have been upheld. Today, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, and incorporated that decision onto the states through the 14th Amendment. In a victory for constitutionalists and Gun Rights advocates, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain’s Opinion in the case Nordyke vs. King states in part the following:

(04-20) 19:10 PDT San Francisco -- A federal appeals court ruled Monday that private citizens can challenge state and local gun laws by invoking the constitutional right to bear arms - the first such ruling in the nation - but upheld a ban on firearms at gun shows at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton. The ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco followed last year's landmark Supreme Court decision that the Constitution's Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess guns for self-defense. The high court struck down a handgun prohibition in Washington, D.C.,...

Alice Marie Beard: The Ninth Circuit has apparently held, in the Nordyke case, that the Second Amendment is incorporated against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment; opinion to come shortly. I will certainly blog more when I can read the opinion. Please note the possibility of error in all such breaking news stories, posted before the opinion is read; I will certainly correct any such error as soon as possible if it turns out the initial account is indeed mistaken.

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Holds that the Second Amendment Applies to the States Tuesday, April 21, 2009 Fairfax, Va. – Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit marked a milestone in Second Amendment history by ruling that the Second Amendment limits state and local government infringements on our right to keep and bear arms through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. NRA has been involved in, and supportive of, this case for the past ten years and has filed several amicus briefs...

Last June, the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, at least in the home for self-defense.  Here’s our own Bob Levy, who masterminded the Heller litigation, talking about that decision: While the Court’s ruling was a watershed in constitutional interpretation, it technically applied only to D.C., striking down the District’s draconian gun ban but not having a direct effect in the rest of the country.Well, today the Ninth Circuit (the federal appellate court covering most Western states) ruled that the Second Amendment restricts the power of state...

We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the “true palladium of liberty.” Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in...

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Second Amendment Foundation today applauded the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco for ruling that the Second Amendment is incorporated against the states and local governments. The majority opinion was written by Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain, with a concurring opinion from Judge Ronald M. Gould, who wrote, “The right to bear arms is a bulwark against external invasion…That we have a lawfully armed populace adds a measure of security for all of us and makes it less likely that a band of terrorists could make headway in an attack on any community before more...

....Birthed in Gold Rush calamity and come of age on the lawless frontier, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been resolving disputes for 150 years in a region once prone to settling differences with pistols at high noon. If one looks closely at the bench in the main courtroom, there is a nick left by a bullet fired during the 1917 Hindu German Conspiracy Trial. Conservatives have been gaining sway over a court that for many years was widely perceived as one of the country's last bastions of judicial liberalism. Now, President Obama is about to start putting...

A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked Royal Dutch Shell from drilling oil wells off Alaska’s North Slope after finding that the Interior Department had failed to conduct an environmental study before issuing the company’s drilling permit. In a long-awaited ruling, the court said that the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency in charge of offshore leasing, had violated the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act by failing to take a “hard look” at the impact that offshore drilling would have on bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea as well as indigenous communities on the North Slope. The decision canceled Shell’s...