Skip to main content

The Supreme Court, completing a list

Image result for second amendment pictures

As regular readers will have noticed, I've been creating a multi-entry list of Supreme Court decisions, naming just one stand-out decision per year. Here is my final entry on that theme, bringing us up to date.

Supreme Court cases, 2010 to the present


2010: McDonald v. Chicago -- second amendment
2011: Snyder v. Phelps -- limit on tort liability for emotional distress (Westboro Baptists and the first amendment)
2012: NFIB v. Sebelius -- the big Obamacare decision
2013: Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics -- genes and patents
2014: Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund -- class certification and securities fraud
2015: Obergefell v. Hodges -- marriage equality
2016: Merrill Lynch v. Manning -- state courts have concurrent jurisdiction on certain securities fraud civil liability issues with the federal courts.

I've now listed a total of 47 SCOTUS decisions in this very subjective way. There should be some broader generalizations here as to which SCOTUS decisions catch my eye. Though perhaps that doesn't strike even my sympathetic readers as the world's most pressing question.

Still, on looking over the whole list, my first impression is that criminal procedure issues are very thoroughly represented. The first such case on this list is U.S. v. Nixon, which at its base is about the extent of a claimed evidentiary privilege. My death penalty case, Gregg, comes under this heading, as does Ybarra and several others.

Also, two of the clauses of the first amendment are well represented. There are at least four free speech cases on this list: Pacifica, Pruneyard, Liquormart, Snyder. One might also include Harper & Row, making the number five. The other clause from that amendment? the establishment clause. My list includes Edwards, Kiryas Joel, The Good News Club, and Zelma. For no good reason the other clauses of the same amendment, as represented for example by such landmarks within this period as Gertz v. Welch  (free press)  or Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (freedom of religion) didn't get onto my list.

One might of course chose to see the Pentagon Papers case, which did get onto this list, as a free press case. But if I understand it rightly it actually turned on the court's view of the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, not on the first amendment's limits to the power of either and/or both of them.

Constitutional structure, especially the relations among the branches, is another recurring theme of this list.  The Pentagon Papers case starts off that theme, and of course we could double-count U.S. v. Nixon to include it here. That is also a factor in the inclusion of Chadha, Chevron, Morrison.

Fourteen, or roughly 30%, of these cases aren't constitutional, they are wholly or chiefly matters of statutory interpretation. This includes three antitrust law cases, three on securities fraud, and four on intellectual property issues.

But enough! you cry, so I comply.

Comments

  1. Christopher, I am unfamiliar with the case you chose for 2013, but I wonder whether it is more significant than Shelby County v. Holder, in which the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, leading Republican states to adopt new bans on African-American voting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Henry,

    Until MYRIAD GENETICS, the US Patent Office was accepting patent applications on isolated DNA sequences. This meant that the nature of human beings, and of other organisms too, was being privatized -- divided into various gene sequences and turned into property, lot by fenced-off lot.

    I think James Watson (who submitted an amicus brief to SCOTUS effectively defending his life's work) stated the issue well: http://patentdocs.typepad.com/files/watson-amicus-brief.pdf "Life's instructions ought not to be controlled by legal monopolies created at the whim of Congress or the courts."

    You can find historical echoes of slavery in SHELBY, but you can find philosophical echoes of slavery in the (thankfully defeated) position of the respondent in MYRIAD GENETICS.

    I suppose the two cases together have a glass-half-empty-or-half-full quality to them. I'm enough of an optimist to have included the decision in which the side of human freedom prevailed.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...