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John McCain and Barack Obama, the two leading presidential candidates, have set out sharply contrasting views on the role of the Supreme Court and the kind of justices they would appoint. Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.), in a speech two weeks ago, echoed the views of conservatives who say "judicial activism" is the central problem facing the judiciary. He called it the "common and systematic abuse . . . by an elite group . . . we entrust with judicial power." On Thursday, he criticized the California Supreme Court for giving gays and lesbians the right to marry, saying he doesn't "believe...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A leading organization that represents the thousands of pregnancy resource centers across the country wants the Supreme Court top hear a New Jersey case involving an abortion practitioner who misled a woman. In November, the New Jersey Supreme Court sided with Sheldon Turkish.The state high court said it won't reconsider the decision it handed down in September against a woman who sued the abortion practitioner for misleading her about the development of her unborn child in a 1996 abortion.Rosa Acuna says Turkish misled her but the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Turkish didn't have...

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against an Algerian convicted of conspiring to detonate explosives at Los Angeles International Airport during the millenium holiday travel rush. In its 8-1 decision, the court upheld Ahmed Ressam's conviction on an explosives charge, one of nine convictions that resulted in a 22-year prison sentence. At issue was whether Ressam should be convicted of carrying explosives during the commission of another serious crime, in Ressam's case, lying on a U.S. Customs form when he crossed the border in December 1999. Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens said that "the most natural reading"...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has upheld criminal penalties for promoting child pornography. The court, in a 7-2 decision...

It is the essence of democracy that people should be able to decide the moral rules that govern the nature of a community. If people don't have that power, then they are living under an autocracy. True, this majority rule is not unlimited. It is limited by what the government has the power to do. Consequently the majority cannot, in general, vote to seize the homes and accumulated savings of rich people. Leaving aside exceptional cases, government cannot mandate how parents how should raise their children. These kinds of power lie outside the scope of government in a free society....

Of all of Antonin Scalia's fellow justices, ultra liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is his best friend. That’s the surprising admission of Scalia, a target of liberals who all but worship Ginsburg. He revealed his closeness to her Friday during an appearance on the "Laura Ingraham Show" where he spoke about his new book “The Art of Persuading Judges.” “I consider myself a good friend of every one of my colleagues, both past and present,” Scalia told Laura. “Some more than others. My best friend on the Court is and has been for many years, Ruth Ginsburg. Her basic approach...

Here's why: 1. Gang of 14. 2. Warren Rudman. 3. McCain said Alito is too conservative. 4. There is absolutely zero logic in thinking that McCain will nominate the type of judge that will overturn his signature bills.

I saw the list of likely retiring justices last year but didn't think to bookmark the page. Does anybody know who they are? Likely Stephens, Ginsburg. I understand that the tradition for justices is to not retire during an election year to spare the country the additional burden of nominee hearings. In this round of retirements, outgoing Constitution-ignoring justices are of course hoping to be replaced by other Constitution-ignoring justices nominated by either Obama or Clinton.

The political “hot button” issues of guns and judges have become intertwined in this election year. The fate of both issues will be decided by the candidate we elect as president. Why? Because over a four-year term, that president will likely appoint at least two and possibly three justices to the United States Supreme Court. Simply stated, this year when we elect a president, we will also cast our ballot for the next Supreme Court. Everyone concerned about the Second Amendment and judicial accountability should heed John McCain’s speech to the NRA on May 16. The presumptive Republican nominee will...

IN A SPEECH on the federal judiciary last week, John McCain sounded the familiar conservative call for judges who know their place. "My nominees," he promised, "will understand that there are clear limits to the scope of judicial power, and clear limits to the scope of federal power." The judiciary's moral authority depends on self-restraint, said McCain, and "this authority quickly vanishes when a court presumes to make law instead of apply it." The senator emphasized the importance of judicial modesty and deference to the elected branches of government, lamenting that "federal judges today issue rulings and opinions on policy...

I was taking a look at USA Today this morning at breakfast. It had a front page article about the Reagan Revolution on the bench. That was the top layer of the article at any rate. Thinly veiled, just below, was the message, "Do you really trust a Republican to appoint any more judges when your rights are at risk?" I guess that's pretty run of the mill journalism, but we'll get a lot of it in the coming months. John Hinderacker is predicting that this year will actually be even worse than what we've gotten used to. Hard to...

Here’s an interesting thing that John McCain wrote about judges: “In the shorthand of constitutional discourse, these abuses by the courts fall under the heading of ‘judicial activism.’ But real activism in our country is democratic. Real activists seek to make their case democratically — to win hearts, minds and majorities to their cause. Such people throughout our history have often shown great idealism and done great good. By contrast, activist lawyers and activist judges follow a different method. They want to be spared the inconvenience of campaigns, elections, legislative votes and all of that. They don’t seek to win...

This election season has been full of stories about bowling scores, barroom boilermakers and basketball. But, recently, a little noticed U.S. Supreme Court ruling may have jeopardized Americans' precious right to vote. In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the most restrictive voter identification law in the country and failed, I think, in its duty to protect the voting rights of all Americans. In its 6-3 decision, the court sanctioned the practice of requiring Indiana voters to present government-issued photo identification in order to vote. Poll taxes, which were used to disenfranchise Southern black...

Remarks By John McCain on Judicial Philosophy May 6, 2008 U.S. Senator John McCain will deliver the following remarks as prepared for delivery at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, NC, today at 10:00 a.m. EDT: Thank you, Ted, and thank you all very much. Dr. Hatch, I'm grateful for your invitation to this great university. And Senator Richard Burr, thank you for that warm welcome to North Carolina and to Wait Chapel. I'm honored to be here, and I brought along a friend. I'm sure you'll recognize him -- my pal, Senator FredThompson of Tennessee. We appreciate the hospitality of...

The Dirty Dozen By Robert A. Levy and William Mellor (Sentinel, 302 pages, $25.95) Town fathers of Norway, take note. You have a new adversary in Ellen Anderson. Ms. Anderson is the Minnesota state senator who is pushing legislation to freeze foreclosures on homes with subprime mortgages in the name of "protecting the American dream." The economic chill from such a move – and from other attempts to protect "the American dream" from mortgage meltdown – would likely be felt around the world by pension plans, banks and municipalities that have invested in mortgage-backed securities. As it happens, a number...

Republican John McCain is castigating Democrat Barack Obama for voting against John Roberts as Supreme Court chief justice. McCain offered an olive branch to the Christian right in a speech about the kind of judges he would nominate planned for Tuesday at Wake Forest University. The far right has been deeply suspicious of McCain, the expected GOP presidential nominee, because he has clashed with its leaders and worked against them on issues like campaign finance reform. McCain promised to appoint judges who, in the mold of Roberts and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, are likely to limit the reach of...

Justice Scalia talked about his book, Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, published by Thomson West, which he wrote with Bryan Garner. The book gives advice to lawyers on presenting oral arguments.

The controversial Roe v. Wade abortion-rights ruling will be overturned if John McCain is elected president, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told a Baton Rouge audience Friday. “It’s gone,” Toobin, also a legal affairs staff writer at The New Yorker, said after giving a speech about the U.S. Supreme Court at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center. “Maybe not during his first year or second year, but it will be overturned,” Toobin said of the possible election of McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and a U.S. senator for Arizona. Toobin said overturning the case won’t mean all 50 states...

The Supreme Court's approval of the country's strictest election standards doesn't mean every state should adopt them - The U.S. Supreme Court stamped its approval this week on Indiana's decision to require voters to show photo identification at the polls. Should Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas get in line? Not necessarily. State lawmakers should always be concerned about the integrity of the ballot, decide what can reasonably and fairly be expected of voters and legislate accordingly. But there is no federal mandate to adopt the photo ID, a solution that still seems to be in search of a problem. In his...

The U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling on Indiana's voter ID law will rank as among the court's worst – up there with Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling allowing forced separation of the races. It wasn't overturned until 1954. Here's hoping it doesn't take 58 years to overturn Monday's misguided decision. The Indiana law is aimed at a phantasm: in-person voter fraud at the polls. In the words of the court's majority, "The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history." To find fraud, the justices went back to New...

The US Supreme Court has just dealt a serious blow to voters' rights that could help put John McCain in the White House by eliminating tens of thousands of voters who generally vote Democratic. By 6-3 the Court has upheld an Indiana law that requires citizens to present a photo identification card in order to vote. Florida, Michigan, Louisiana, Georgia, Hawaii and South Dakota have similar laws. Though it's unlikely, as many as two dozen other states could add them by election day. Other states, like Ohio, have less stringent ID requirements than Indiana's, but still have certain restrictions that...

April 30, 2008, 6:00 a.m. Voters Are Far from the Biggest LosersLife after Crawford. By Abigail Thernstrom For one of the most anticipated big decisions of the current Supreme Court term, the Indiana voter-ID ruling Monday is certainly a bit anti-climactic. No big deal, Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the lead opinion, said, in essence. The Indiana law requires citizens, before voting, to show an approved photo identification — a passport or driver’s license, for instance. “There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,� Stevens concluded....

During a segment on Monday’s "The Situation Room," host Wolf Blitzer and CNN justice correspondent Kelli Arena framed the Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana’s "strict" voter ID law according to the liberal view (a law so "strict" that it calls for the voter show photo ID before voting). Arena’s report offered three critics of the decision to only one supporter, who happened to be Indiana’s Secretary of State. One of the three critics was a quadriplegic who apparently "had to pay more than $100 to get documentation to prove who she was" before getting an ID in Indiana. After Arena’s...

CRAWFORD v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BD. (Nos. 07-21 and 07-25) Web-accessible at:     http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-21.ZS.html  Argued: January 9, 2008 -- Decided: April 28, 2008* Opinion author: Stevens ===============================================================   After Indiana enacted an election law (SEA 483) requiring citizens voting in person to present government-issued photo identification, petitioners filed separate suits challenging the law's constitutionality. Following discovery, the District Court granted respondents summary judgment, finding the evidence in the record insufficient to support a facial attack on the statute's validity. In affirming, the Seventh Circuit declined to judge the law by the strict standard set for poll taxes in Harper v....

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law on Monday, concluding in a splintered decision that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. The 6-to-3 ruling kept the door open to future lawsuits that provided more evidence. But this theoretical possibility was small comfort to the dissenters or to critics of voter ID laws, who predicted that a more likely outcome than successful lawsuits would be the spread of measures that would keep some legitimate would-be voters from the polls. Voting experts said the ruling...

Elections: The Supreme Court got it right Monday in ruling 6-3 (with even liberal John Paul Stevens agreeing) that states are free to require voters to produce photo identification at the polls.Everyone in the country should be pleased with the news. But, of course, not everyone is. It's almost as if some are disturbed that the ruling will make it harder to commit voter fraud. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance. It was the ACLU's suit against the state of Indiana over its requirement that voters need to produce a photo ID at the polls that led to the...

The Supreme Court's refusal to strike down an Indiana law requiring government-issued photo identification at the ballot box could disenfranchise minority and elderly voters at next week's primary and prompt other states to pass similar laws, voting advocates said Monday. The court, in a splintered 6-3 ruling Monday, said Indiana's law, which took effect in 2006 and requires voters to present a state or federal photo ID card at the ballot box, does not violate the First or 14th amendments. The court said the law served as a justifiable protection to the electoral process. "It's especially worrisome that the court...

Sunday night on “60 Minutes,” Lesley Stahl interviewed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Half of the interview was excellent, reviewing his history from his childhood in New York City. The other half of the interview, on his judicial philosophy, was dreadful. Several times, Stahl attacked Scalia for his judicial theory of “originalism,” while leaving parts of his comments on the cutting room floor. She displayed a lack of knowledge about the Constitution. She referred to Scalia’s theory as fixing the meaning of the Constitution as the intentions of “people who ratified it over 200 years ago.” That echoed the comments...

Not many Supreme Court justices become famous, but Antonin Scalia is one of the few. Known as "Nino" to his friends and colleagues, he is one of the most brilliant and combative justices ever to sit on the court and one of the most prominent legal thinkers of his generation. He first agreed to talk to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl about a new book he's written on how lawyers should address the court. But over the course of several conversations, our story grew into a full-fledged profile - his first major television interview - including discussions about abortion and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has ruled that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights. The decision validates Republican-inspired voter ID laws. The court vote 6-3 to uphold Indiana's strict photo ID requirement. Democrats and civil rights groups say the law would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots.

Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, Case No. 07-21 http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-21.pdf

Justice Antonin Scalia on Sunday characterized himself as a social conservative and "a law-and-order guy" whose views do not impact his interpretation of the Constitution. In an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes," Scalia addressed issues from abortion to flag-burning. Were he to approach his job differently, Scalia said, he would adopt the position of abortion opponents who interpret the Constitution to mean that a state must prohibit abortion. But the authors of the Constitution did not write about abortion, so he does not support the approach favored by abortion opponents, said the justice, who is promoting a new book, "Making...

After the Senate's long winter, there are signs of an April thaw on judges. Under pressure from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Democratic leader Harry Reid has agreed to a plan to confirm three of President Bush's appellate court nominees by Memorial Day. The issue now is whether Mr. McConnell will let Democrats get away with confirming their favored nominees instead of those whose nominations have been pending for years. Republican Arlen Specter has the right idea in requesting a discharge petition to confirm Peter Keisler on the D.C. Circuit, plus Robert Conrad and Steve Matthews on the Fourth Circuit Court...

Adverse possession law set to change. Beginning July 1, people hoping to use "adverse possession" to take control of another person's land had better be prepared to pay for it... The bill, which garnered wide bipartisan support among state lawmakers, requires that an adverse possessor believe in "good faith" that the land is actually his or her own. It also raises the burden of proof in an adverse-possession case and gives judges the power to make plaintiffs payfor any land they are awarded. Witwer on Friday said the bill is a victory for property owners. "This will make it harder...

A Boulder County District Court judge charged with revisiting a controversial land dispute should not consider "outrageous" claims that Richard McLean and Edith Stevens lied to win their case, according to the couple's attorney. In court documents submitted Tuesday, Boulder attorney Kim Hult responded pointedly to accusations made by Don and Susie Kirlin that their neighbors fabricated a path across their Hardscrabble Drive vacant lot. The thin dirt trail, which has come to be known as "Edie's Path," was a critical piece of evidence that in part led Judge James C. Klein last fall to award about a third of...

John Paul Stevens, age 88 Antonin Scalia, age 72 Anthony Kennedy, age 71 David Souter, age 68 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, age 75 Stephen Breyer, age 69

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a CBS News interview that will air on Sunday, says the Constitution neither allows legal abortions nor does it prohibit them. Scalia has been outspoken recently about how the Constitution does not guarantee any abortion rights. During the "60 Minutes" interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl, Scalia said the Constitution is silent on the issue of abortion. He said he favors overturning Roe v. Wade, which has ushered in 35 years of unlimited abortions, but says states aren't forced to ban abortions if the case is reversed. "On the abortion thing, for example, if indeed...

People who believe the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision giving the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush was politically motivated should just get over it, says Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia denies that the controversial decision was political and discusses other aspects of his public and private life in a remarkably candid interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, this Sunday, April 27, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. "I say nonsense," Scalia responds to Stahl’s observation that people say the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore v. Bush was based on politics and not justice. "Get over it. It’s so old by now....

The Constitution doesn't prohibit abortion any more than it allows it, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says in a television news interview to be broadcast Sunday. Scalia told CBS News'"60 Minutes" that he may be conservative, but he is not biased on issues that come before the court. "I mean, I confess to being a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases," Scalia said in excerpts released Thursday. "On the abortion thing, for example, if indeed I were ... trying to impose my own views, I would not only be opposed to Roe versus Wade, I...

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday that police have the power to conduct searches and seize evidence, even when done during an arrest that turns out to have violated state law. The unanimous decision comes in a case from Portsmouth, Va., where city detectives seized crack cocaine from a motorist after arresting him for a traffic ticket offense. David Lee Moore was pulled over for driving on a suspended license. The violation is a minor crime in Virginia and calls for police to issue a court summons and let the driver go. Instead, city detectives arrested Moore and prosecutors...

... Consider Barack Obama. The Democratic front-runner and former lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago has explained his thinking toward judicial appointments thusly: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.” When defending his vote against Justice John Roberts’ confirmation, Obama explained that the standard for a justice must be “one’s deepest values, one’s core...

The U.S. Supreme Court opened the door today to the resumption of capital punishment nationwide, ruling that the combination of drugs that California and most other states use to execute inmates does not cause a substantial risk of severe pain and therefore is constitutional. The justices' 7-2 ruling came in a case from Kentucky, which like California uses a powerful anesthetic to render an inmate unconscious, followed by a paralyzing drug that halts breathing and a chemical that stops the heart. At least 30 states of the 36 that provide for lethal injection use that combination. Condemned prisoners in virtually...

WASHINGTON - All five Roman Catholic justices on the Supreme Court were invited to Wednesday night's splashy White House dinner in honor of Pope Benedict XVI. Republican presidential contender John McCain will be there, too. But Democratic rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who had a nationally broadcast debate scheduled Wednesday night, were not invited. About 250 guests were to attend the dinner. Benedict will not be there because he will be attending an evening prayer service with U.S. bishops. The guests include former Los Angeles Dodgers baseball manager Tommy Lasorda, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader John...

In a widely splintered decision, the Supreme Court cleared the way for executions to resume across the country, concluding that the most common method of lethal injection does not violate the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a Los Angeles man's last remaining challenge to his death sentence for the murder of a student librarian in 1978, one of the oldest cases on California's Death Row. Stevie Lamar Fields had won a reversal of his sentence in 2000 from a federal judge, who ruled that he should get a new penalty trial because the jury foreman cited biblical passages to his fellow jurors after a majority had voted in favor of a life sentence. But a federal appeals court reinstated the death sentence last year, and the high court denied...

8 proud United States Marines have mortgaged nearly all they own, taken donations, and collectively spent a million dollars defending themselves against charges associated with the deaths of twenty-four people in Haditha, Iraq. Conversely, since 2002, more than eight hundred ‘Guantanamo Bay Bar Association’ lawyers, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and many of America’s top-tier legal firms have — “pro bono” — nearly wallpapered our federal court system of behalf of America’s enemies. With the Supreme Court now considering whether the ‘Detainee Treatment Act of 2005′ provides sufficient due process to al Qaeda, the ACLU recently announced it had assembled...

This June marks the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most profound Supreme Court rulings in history, a civil-rights landmark that nudged America closer to the color-blind goal envisioned by Martin Luther King in 1963. The decision was not flawless, but it opened the door for later decisions and political actions that ultimately made America a stronger nation. In June 1978, the Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that racial quotas were unconstitutional and a blatant violation of civil and human rights. The ruling brought justice to Allan Bakke, a brilliant, courageous aspiring doctor who...

I dearly wish our Founding Fathers James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had been able to see Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas explain on C-SPAN's "America and the Courts" (March 28) why they and nearly all their colleagues are so hostilely against allowing millions of Americans to see the High Court on television during the revealing oral arguments. On that C-SPAN program, in excerpts from the Kennedy-Thomas testimony before a House committee, Kennedy, sternly lecturing that Congress should not legislate this intrusion into a key process in how and why they make their decisions, which affect so many...

Three years after Congress granted the federal government unprecedented waiver authority, 14 congressmen are challenging how that authority is being used to construct a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. On Monday, U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., led a group, including Rio Grande Valley U.S. Rep. Solomon Ortiz, to file a brief in Supreme Court which questions the constitutionality of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's waivers. Last week's waivers filed by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would suspend more than 30 laws, which Chertoff said could interfere with "the expeditious construction of barriers." It was the fourth set of...

An East Bay lawmaker's bill to clear the way for local handgun bans has a committee hearing Tuesday (April 8), delving into issues now pending before the state's and nation's highest courts. Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, authored AB 2566 in reaction to a state Court of Appeal ruling in January which upheld the voiding of San Francisco's Measure H of 2005, approved by voters to bar city residents from owning handguns or from making or selling firearms or ammunition in the city.