Elena Kagan was sworn in Saturday as the 112th justice and fourth woman ever to serve on the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath to Kagan in a brief private ceremony at the court. Kagan, joined by family and friends, pledged to faithfully and impartially uphold the law.
Afterward, she smiled broadly as a crowd of onlookers stood and applauded. “We look forward to serving with you,” Roberts said.
The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution’s Second Amendment restrains government’s ability to significantly limit “the right to keep and bear arms,” advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.
By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices also signaled, however, that some limitations on the right could survive legal challenges.
The Supreme Court has upheld a federal law that bars “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, rejecting a free speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups.
The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.
Material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.
A legal battle over who gets to control California’s massive spending on prisons — judges or corrections officials — may be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, with overcrowding at the state’s 33 prisons at the center of the debate.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state officials have challenged an edict from three federal judges that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation must cut the prison population by 40,000, or about a quarter of its 165,000 inmates. The judges’ order, issued last August, cited overcrowding as the main cause of healthcare failures that amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and left inmates to die from treatable conditions at the rate of one per week.
The Supreme Court blocked the government Tuesday from deporting legal immigrants for minor drug possession charges, ruling that only serious or violent crimes called for removing otherwise law-abiding people from this country.
In a 9-0 decision, the justices stopped the deportation of a Texas man who had pleaded guilty at different times to having a marijuana cigarette and a single Xanax pill, a prescription anti-anxiety drug.
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants’ rights “upside down.”
A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.
The ruling comes in a case where a suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich. He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.
The U.S. Supreme Court has whacked the National Football League and most of the nation’s big sports leagues, denying them a long-sought exemption from federal antitrust laws.
The justices ruled unanimously on Monday that the NFL’s merchandising agreements, and by inference, similar agreements in other leagues, are not automatically exempt from the nation’s anti-monopoly laws.
This case amounted to a Hail Mary pass by the NFL, an attempt at a legal game ender, with other sports leagues cheering on the football league. But the NFL was sacked by the Supreme Court and its 90-year-old senior justice, John Paul Stevens.
In his opinion for the court, Stevens outlined the facts. It used to be that the NFL licensed lots of companies to manufacture and sell caps, shirts, sweatshirts — all the stuff with team logos. But in 2000, like other sports leagues, the NFL decided to award its merchandising license for all 32 of its teams to just one manufacturer, Reebok.
The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether a Texas death row inmate should have access to evidence for DNA testing that he says could clear him of three murders.
The justices said Monday they will use the case of Hank Skinner to decide whether prison inmates may use a federal civil rights law to do DNA testing that was not performed prior to their conviction.
Federal appeals courts around the country have decided the issue differently. The high court previously blocked Skinner’s execution while it considered his appeal.
Skinner, 47, faced lethal injection for the bludgeoning and strangling of his girlfriend, Twila Jean Busby, 40, and the stabbing of her two adult sons. The slayings occurred at their home in the Texas Panhandle town of Pampa on New Year’s Eve in 1993.
He was arrested about three hours after the bodies were found. Police found him in a closet at the trailer home of a woman he knew. He was splattered with the blood of at least two of the victims.
Monday, the court ruled that teenagers may not be locked up for life without chance of parole if they haven’t killed anyone.
By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court said the Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.
The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.
“The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. “This the Eighth Amendment does not permit.”
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court’s four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal officials can indefinitely hold inmates considered “sexually dangerous” after their prison terms are complete.
The high court reversed a lower court decision that said Congress overstepped its authority in allowing indefinite detentions of considered “sexually dangerous.”
“The statute is a ‘necessary and proper’ means of exercising the federal authority that permits Congress to create federal criminal laws, to punish their violation, to imprison violators, to provide appropriately for those imprisoned and to maintain the security of those who are not imprisoned by who may be affected by the federal imprisonment of others,” said Justice Stephen Breyer, writing the majority opinion.
The Supreme Court is closing its iconic front entrance beneath the words “Equal Justice Under Law.’’
Beginning today, visitors no longer will ascend the wide marble steps to enter the 75-year-old building. They will be directed to a central screening facility to the side of and beneath the central steps that was built to improve the court’s security as part of a $122 million renovation.
Two justices, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, called the change unfortunate and unjustified.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that a white cross, erected as a war memorial and placed on national parkland in California’s Mojave desert, does not violate the constitutional separation of church and state.
The 5-4 majority concluded Congress acted properly when it tried to transfer land around the Mojave Memorial Cross to veterans groups, an effort to eliminate any Establishment Clause violation. A federal appeals panel had blocked that property swap.
At issue before the justices was whether the display fundamentally violates the first ten words of the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said Friday he will retire this year, giving President Obama another opportunity to shape the nation’s highest court.
Stevens, who turns 90 on April 20 and has served nearly 35 years on the court, announced his resignation in a brief letter delivered to the White House at 10:30 a.m. Friday.
Obama lauded the retiring justice Friday afternoon and said he will move quickly to fill the vacancy before the court reconvenes in October.
“He turns 90 this month, but he leaves at the top of his game,” the president said from the White House. “His leadership will be sorely missed.”
Stevens referred to the timing of his resignation in his letter to Obama.
In a decision that could affect tens of thousands of people, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that immigrants living in this country must be told by their lawyers whether pleading guilty to a crime could lead to deportation.
Jose Padilla, a native of Honduras and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, has lived in the United States legally for 40 years. A truck driver, he was stopped at a weigh station in Kentucky in 2001, and gave a law enforcement officer permission to search his truck. Stowed among his registered cargo were 23 Styrofoam boxes containing a half-ton of marijuana. Although he was a legal permanent resident, he was held erroneously in prison without bond as an illegal alien. He refused to plead guilty until the eve of trial, and says he only agreed because his lawyer assured him that his guilty plea and a five-year prison sentence would not affect his immigration status. The lawyer was wrong.
The Supreme Court handed a victory to the $11 trillion mutual fund industry by endorsing a 1982 legal standard to decide the fairness of fund fees, a ruling that gives companies considerable freedom to set investment adviser charges.
The justices unanimously adopted the standard in a 1982 U.S. appeals court ruling that fees are excessive only when they are so high they could not be the result of arm’s-length bargaining and bear no reasonable relationship to the services provided.
Industry executives and attorneys described the high court’s ruling as a big win because it limits the potential that Congress or lower courts could force fund firms to reduce the roughly $90 billion they collect in fees every year.
Texas death row inmate Hank Skinner, convicted of murdering his girlfriend and her two sons 16 years ago, has only one request before he is executed next week.
He says the state should be required to do DNA tests of evidence from the victim, such as semen and blood under her fingernails, that could prove, once and for all, who was the real killer. His lawyers do not say they are certain he is innocent. They are certain, however, that no one should be put to death without testing crucial evidence that could show the wrong man was convicted.
Skinner has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the execution, set for Wednesday, to permit time for the testing.
The Supreme Court said on Monday it would decide whether constitutional free-speech rights protected anti-gay protests by members of a Kansas church at funerals for U.S. military members killed in Iraq.
The high court agreed to consider whether the protesters’ message and picketing was protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, even though it was a private family funeral.
Parents who say that a range of preventive vaccines given their young children can cause serious health problems will have their appeal heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The justices Monday agreed to decide whether drug makers can be sued outside a special judicial forum set up by Congress in 1986 to address specific claims about safety. The so-called vaccine court has handled such disputes and was designed to ensure a reliable, steady supply of the drugs by reducing the threat of lawsuits against pharmaceutical firms.
The Supreme Court appeared willing Tuesday to say that the Constitution’s right to possess guns limits state and local regulation of firearms. But the justices also suggested that some gun control measures might not be affected.
The court heard arguments in a case that challenges handgun bans in the Chicago area by asking the high court to extend to state and local jurisdictions the sweep of its 2008 decision striking down a gun ban in the federal enclave of Washington, D.C.
The biggest questions before the court seemed to be how, rather than whether, to issue such a ruling and whether some regulation of firearms could survive. On the latter point, Justice Antonin Scalia said the majority opinion he wrote in the 2008 case “said as much.”
It’s a 28-word law that federal prosecutors have used for more than two decades to send high-profile public officials and corporate executives, including former Enron Corp. CEO Jeff Skilling, to prison.
But the law’s future could be in doubt as Skilling’s appeal of his criminal convictions — in which he challenges the statute’s constitutional validity — is set to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.
Skilling’s challenge of the law is one of three the high court is hearing in its current term, and legal experts say it has the best chance of convincing the justices to strike down the statute. Unclear, though, is whether a successful challenge would overturn some of Skilling’s convictions or all of them, possibly resulting in a new trial.