Free Republic

On July 1st, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) finished its term until October. The history books may refer to the present court as the “Roberts Court,” named so after current Chief Justice John Roberts, but many analysts are talking about Justice Kennedy. “It is impossible to overstate the importance of Justice Kennedy,” Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News told the audience at the Heritage Foundation last Thursday. A panel of journalists, including Mr. Stohr, Charles Lane of The Washington Post, and Stephen Henderson of McClatchy Newspapers, focused most of their remarks on “Justice Kennedy’s Hamlet moment,” as Mr....

Today (Tuesday) the San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial entitled, “Why Alito is the wrong choice.” Instead of demonstrating what it says, it demonstrates why the Chronicle has failed to do its homework as reporters, in preparing its editorial. Here’s why: The editorial begins with this statement: In some ways, Alito's taciturn approach to questions about the great constitutional issues of our time was similar to that of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. But the distinction between the history of the two judges -- and the role of the justice they were nominated to replace -- are important. First,...

In November 2003, Raymond Burke, then the bishop of LaCrosse, Wis., instructed priests in his diocese to deny Communion to three politicians unless they publicly recanted their pro-abortion rights positions, an action some Catholic scholars say is tantamount to excommunication. Since then, Burke's supporters have increasingly pointed to what they see as parallels with another case, and another moral hero, from 40 years ago. In the wake of the United States Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Joseph Francis Rummel, Archbishop of New Orleans, began planning the integration of the archdiocese's schools. It would take eight years,...

THE NEXT time a group of black folks invites somebody with the last name of Cosby to speak anywhere, you can be sure it'll be Camille Cosby, not her husband, Bill. A few years back, after the Cosbys' only son, Ennis, was killed by a Russian immigrant who had racist attitudes toward black people, Camille Cosby published an op-ed piece blaming whites. It was white America, Camille Cosby wrote, who taught her son's killer to hate blacks. She even drew a connection to President Ulysses S. Grant's picture on the $50 bill and his ownership of two slaves - who...

They were six words that convulsed a nation. On May 17, 1954 - 50 years ago - nine justices of the US Supreme Court declared: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Before them was the case of Linda Brown, a seven-year-old black student in Topeka, Kansas, who was suing the local board of education so she could attend a whites-only school closer to her home, rather than a far away, segregated black school. The judges' decision in Brown v Board undid a notorious 1896 decision, Plessey v Ferguson, which had legalised the idea that black and white Americans could receive...