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Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor flatly rejected on Monday the view that any U.S. Supreme Court justices practice judicial activism. Speaking Monday to a standing-room only event at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., the 60-year-old justice was asked to give her reaction to those who complain about judicial activism on the one hand, yet want the Court to declare laws unconstitutional on the other. "I think most judges have a definition of judicial activism," Sotomayor said. "It’s a ruling you don’t like."Sotomayor’s assertion that no judicial activism exists — an article of faith...

Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Have Sights Set On US Supreme Court In 2015 Highest court to decide this week if it will take up marriage appeals 36 states now recognize same-sex marriages after landmark year Amanda Holpuch 6 January 2015 Last year saw same-sex marriage bans fall at a pace nearly unheard of for any social movement in American history, but advocates on all sides of the issue are hoping 2015 will bring a definitive legal decision from the US supreme court on whether same-sex marriage should be the uncontested law of the land. On Monday, Florida became the 36th US...

A Texas court ruled Thursday to overturn the conviction of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who was found guilty of money laundering in 2010. According to KHOU 11 and the Associated Press, the Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the case's evidence was "legally insufficient to sustain DeLay's convictions," formally acquitting the former congressman on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The US Supreme Court is chickening out and taking a step back from the entire NSA scandal. Rather than making a final decision on whether the bulk telephone metadata surveillance program is constitutional, the Supreme Court has decided to decline the case. Instead, the Court has now left lower courts to contradict each other over the legality of this particular NSA surveillance program. One court, for instance, has described the metadata program as an “almost-Orwellian” effort. In fact, this particular petition brought to the Supreme Court concerns precisely a decision given out by US District Judge Richard Leon, who also...

Link only: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/07/supreme-court-gay-lesbian-marriage-photographer/7304157/

A U.S. appeals court ordered YouTube on Wednesday to take down an anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in many parts of the Middle East, prompting widespread riots and influential clerics calling for the death of an American actress who sued for the removal of the clip from the site. The decision by a divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a lawsuit filed against YouTube by an actress who appeared briefly in the 2012 video that led to rioting and deaths because of its negative portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad.

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia handed down a scathing dissent in United States v. Windsor — the case in which the high court deemed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional — he warned of the domino effect it would have on state bans on gay marriage. His prediction came true on Friday, when U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby ruled that Utah's 2004 ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional. And Shelby even made note of Scalia's dissent at points in his ruling, citing it as part of his reasoning in striking down the Utah law. Scalia warned that...

US prosecutors handling the case of two black teenagers accused of shooting dead a white Australian baseball player said Friday there was no evidence to suggest the killing was racially-motivated. The murder of Chris Lane, 22, in the small Oklahoma town of Duncan has triggered a race debate in America after it emerged that one of the victim's alleged killers had posted racist comments on Twitter earlier this year. Several commentators have questioned why authorities had not pressed to have hate crime charges added to the indictment of James Edwards, 15, and Chancey Luna, 16, who are both charged with...

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...

As LifeNews reported today, the judge in the Kermit Gosnell murder trial dropped three murder charges related to babies he killed in his horrific abortion-infanticide process. One of the three charges the judge dropped includes a 28-week unborn baby who was killed in an abortion-infanticide and eventually discovered in a freezer at Gosnell’s clinic. LifeNews has identified that another charge involved “Baby B,” about whom a Gosnell staffer testified was a newborn child who survived a failed abortion and was still breathing into a shoe box. Kareema Cross told the jury she saw at least 10 children who were breathing...

Hyping "growing support" for same-sex marriage, CNN's Carol Costello asked a supporter of California's Proposition 8 on Monday if he was "on the wrong side of history" for legally defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Her tone fits right with Friday's CNN panel where a traditional marriage supporter was disgustingly marginalized as a segregationist and compared to a slave owner. Costello cited GOP strategist Karl Rove admitting that he could see a Republican presidential candidate publicly support same-sex marriage in 2016. She then asked Austin Nimocks of the Alliance Defense Fund, "Austin, you heard what Karl Rove...

AFP - With Thermos bottles, sleeping bags and a few good books, about a dozen people lined up Friday to be among the first to attend oral arguments at the US Supreme Court on gay marriage. Never mind that the hearings don't begin until next Tuesday. They said they were determined to have front-row seats at one of the year's most anticipated sessions of the highest court in the nation.

SACRAMENTO – ProtectMarriage.com, the official proponents of California’s voter-passed Proposition 8, petitioned the United States Supreme Court today to review the misguided decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declaring the initiative unconstitutional. Earlier this year in a 2-1 decision in the Perry v Brown case, the Ninth Circuit – the most frequently overturned federal appellate court in the nation – errantly upheld a federal district judge’s decision that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited California from enacting Prop 8 to restore the traditional definition of marriage between a man and a woman. “Marriage between a...

Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations. Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the...

President Obama, in his drive for a national healthcare overhaul, strove to provide a new guarantee that all Americans, no matter where they lived, would have basic protection against sickness and disease, ending decades of variations among states. ..... < snip > Under the court's ruling, states will be free to decide not to cover all their poor residents through their Medicaid programs.That may mean liberal states that have embraced the healthcare law such as California, Massachusetts and Maryland will in 2014 effectively offer all their residents health coverage, a key goal of the law Obama signed two years ago....

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court cited First Amendment rights to free speech in striking down a law that made it a federal crime to falsely claim to have been awarded military-honor medals. The 6-3 majority opinion upheld a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that had declared unconstitutional the Stolen Valor Act, a 2006 statute Congress passed "to protect the reputation and meaning" of military honors.

WASHINGTON — Justice Elena Kagan cast her first vote on the Supreme Court late Tuesday, joining the liberals in dissent when the high court cleared the way for the execution of an Arizona murderer. The 5-4 ruling overturned orders by a federal judge in Phoenix and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that had stopped the execution by lethal injection of Jeffrey Landrigan. His lawyers, in a last-ditch appeal, had raised questions about one of the drugs used in the execution. Since the only U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental had suspended production, Arizona officials said they...

The Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a ballot initiative that sought to amend the state’s constitution to establish that Florida residents have a right to refuse to purchase mandatory health insurance – including under President Obama’s reform effort. The state high court voted 5 to 2 to exclude the referendum issue from the November ballot. The action is a victory for supporters of the Obama health reform program and a setback for opponents, including state lawyers leading an effort in federal court in the Florida panhandle to have the national health insurance program declared unconstitutional. Florida was slated to...