Issues of health [and its insurance] seem pretty paradigmatically Trumpy. After all, Donald Trump's first presidency ended amidst a haze of charges and counter-charges about the Covid epidemic and his handling thereof. His second presidency began after a team-up with the craziest member of the Kennedy clan, who was elevated to the post of Secretary of Health. Also, there is the generally accepted fact that Trump's three nominees to the Supreme Court were generally chosen because they would advance the cause of reversing ROE v. WADE. And of course, they accomplished that mission. Church-state disputes, classic "establishment clause" matters of the sort that once would have been handled under the three-part Lemon test, are also Trumpy, because this is an administration of a more-or-less avowed Christian nationalism. Finally, the issue of due process within the ambit of deportation proceedings is the Trumpiest legal question imaginable. So in this post...
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The court this term went in different directions on the two sorts of gerrymandering. It may have finally closed out its long history of fiddling around the matter of "partisan gerrymandering," by deciding that it doesn't possess and cannot fashion the tools to deal with that. I'm reminded somewhat of the "shopping malls as public forums" cases in the 1960s and into the '70s. The idea was that malls, though privately owned, were functionally public places, so people have first amendment rights there. Even the Warren Court was hesitant about this, but the hesitancy seemed to make the subject cutting edge/intellectually stimulating. Eventually, though, the Burger court decided the idea had been a bad one, and backed far away. The Roberts court has now done much the same with partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause. But a couple of weeks earlier, the court had decided Virginia House of Delegates v Bethune, a case that seems to indicate ...
Continuing my line of posts creating an arbitrary list of THE landmark case for each year. This time, we'll work our way from the moment of the lip syncing of Milli Vanilli to that of the sexual orality of Monica Lewinsky. I've posted one of them as the image for this entry. 1990, Cruzan v.Missouri -- States may require "clear and convincing evidence" of patient's end-of-life wishes (living wills). 1991, Harmelin v. Michigan -- life sentence without possibility of parole for possession of cocaine held not to be cruel and unusual punishment. 1992, Casey v. Planned Parenthood -- re-affirmation of right to an abortion as part of privacy right. 1993, Daubert v. Merrill Dow -- creation of the Daubert standard for the testimony of expert witnesses. 1994, Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet -- Satmar Hasidic Jews can't get their own public school district. 1995, Adarand Construction v. Pena -- affirmative action as race-based set asides....
The first amendment to the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...." Notice that it does not say "Congress shall not establish a religion." It says "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." I make this observation because in my experience people defending, say, laws that put a depiction of two tablets with ten commandments on them in public places are apt to ask, "What religion does it establish?' Their point apparently is that the event to which such art makes allusion is important to at least three world religions, thus the depiction thereof in a courtroom is not an "establishment" of any of those religions, thus it is not a violation of the establishment clause. I attempt to point out, when I encounter such a feint, that the language quoted above doesn't merely prohibit Congress from establishing a religion. It prohibits laws respecting an establish...