Independent voices from the TWT Communities
A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
Someone ought to point out to Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in no way restricts an individual state's laws concerning who in that state may marry, nor does it restrict laws having to do with receipt of state benefits attendant to persons married in that state ("Supreme Court questions DOMA's legitimacy," Web, March 28).
The Supreme Court is trying to sort out a wrenching adoption case involving a American Indian child, a biological father who first renounced any interest in her, and adoptive parents who eventually were ordered to hand her over to the father.
The Supreme Court seemed worried Monday about the idea of companies patenting genes that can be found inside the human body, as it heard arguments in a case that could profoundly reshape U.S. medical research and the fight against diseases such as breast and ovarian cancer.
The federal government has a "powerful interest" in a single, uniform definition of marriage, even if it excludes gay unions that are legal in individual states, the lawyer defending the federal Defense of Marriage Act said Wednesday as the Supreme Court concluded two days of landmark arguments on gay marriage.
Gay marriage is on trial but it was the Obama administration facing the heat as the Supreme Court began the second of two days of landmark oral arguments on the constitutionality of gay marriage.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, often pegged as a key swing-vote between the court's conservative and liberal blocs, has signaled that children of same-sex couples suffer an "immediate legal injury" from California's ban on gay marriage, according to an account of the high court's oral arguments provided by Bloomberg News.
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that textbooks and other goods made and sold abroad can be re-sold online and in discount stores without violating U.S. copyright law. The outcome was a huge relief to eBay, Costco and other businesses that trade in products made outside the U.S.
Decades of civil-rights law hung in the balance Wednesday as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case seeking to end the federal government's role as arbiter of states' decisions on how to run elections, with one conservative justice saying the role perpetuated "racial entitlement."
We are heading into the last days before the most momentous election in the 21st century, in which the voters in the United States are faced with a stark choice between two different visions for the country.
When you are thinking about the next election, don't forget the third branch of government. The judicial branch, headed by the Supreme Court, is extremely important for all the issues we are concerned about this election.
Supreme Court justices sharply questioned the University of Texas' use of race in college admissions Wednesday in a case that could lead to new limits on affirmative action.
Supreme Court justices sharply questioned the University of Texas' use of race in college admissions Wednesday, hearing arguments in a case that could lead to new limits on affirmative-action policies in higher education and elsewhere.
On the final day of the Supreme Court's 2012 term, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued his blockbuster decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare -- aka the Affordable Care Act. In a single opinion, Justice Roberts gave us a treatise on constitutional law in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Kathleen Sebelius.
As the Supreme Court revisits the use of race in college admissions next week, critics of affirmative action are hopeful the justices will roll back the practice. A new report out Wednesday offers a big reason for their optimism: evidence from at least some of the nine states that don't use affirmative action that leading public universities can bring meaningful diversity to their campuses through race-neutral means.
"The use of DNA for identification is no different than matching an arrestee's face to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect; or matching tattoos to known gang symbols to reveal a criminal affiliation; or matching the arrestee's fingerprints to those recovered from a crime scene," Kennedy said. "DNA is another metric of identification used to connect the arrestee with his or her public persona, as reflected in records of his or her actions that are available to police."
