PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tags supreme & court

Republican prospects in November's elections are decidedly brighter today as result of the ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court on same-sex marriage. The court ruled that same sex partners must be granted the same rights and benefits afforded opposite-sex couples under New Jersey's civil marriage statues, but deferred to the state legislature the decision on whether the same sex arrangement should be called marriage. So the court essentially said that same sex partnership walks like a duck, looks like a duck and should be granted all the rights and benefits of a duck, but concluded it didn't have the authority to call it a duck.

Lawyers for a man convicted of beating a former girlfriend to death with a lead pipe argued before the Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday that their client should be spared the death penalty, partly because jurors were not allowed to smoke while deliberating. ()() Talk about a broken judicial system. This should be titled "Defense Lawyers Gone Wild!"

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, admits his group lied about the number of women who died from legal abortions when testifying before the Supreme Court in 1972. "We spoke of 5,000 - 10,000 deaths a year ... I confess that I knew the figures were totally false ... it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

In a largely symbolic gesture, voters in Supreme Court Justice David Souter's hometown weighed in Tuesday on a proposal to seize his 200-year-old farmhouse as payback for a ruling that expanded government's authority to take property.

They may opt to use a statewide referendum to repeal the law, denying those who supported the ban the opportunity to take it all to the way to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Should Planned Parenthood lost the ballot vote, it could still file a lawsuit against the ban. ()() I'm pretty sure they would have trouble even getting a referendum on the ballot. Who's going to sign a petitition in favor of killing babies?

Back in December the ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to rule that it is unconstitutional for Congress to force law schools that object to discrimination against gay people to give the military access to their recruitment programs.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that colleges that accept federal money must allow military recruiters on campus, despite university objections to the Pentagon's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays.

Parents are allowed to sue a doctor if a genetic screening misses a severe or fatal condition that would have caused them to seek an abortion, a divided state Supreme Court ruled Friday. The 4-3 decision limited such lawsuits to costs associated with a pregnancy and the birth of the child, saying such parents could not sue for pain-and-suffering damages or repayment of the costs of raising a disabled child.

The Missouri Supreme Court has upheld the state's 24-hour waiting period for abortions, a decision that turns the focus of the legal battle to federal court. The unanimous ruling Tuesday by Missouri's highest court focused on whether the 2003 law ran contrary to the state constitution. The judges rejected arguments that it was overly vague and deprived people of liberty and privacy rights.

One hundred fifty years ago, a Constitutional crisis took place similar to one that we have been threatened with over Roe v. Wade -- one in which no moral consensus could be achieved between the three branches of government. The first constitutional crisis was over the hot-button issue of that day: slavery. The Supreme Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, and the president, Abraham Lincoln -- to his everlasting credit -- refused to recognize the Court’s decision.

Do people have a right to medical treatment whether or not they can pay? What about a right to food or decent housing? Would a U.S. Supreme Court justice hold that these are rights just like those enumerated in our Bill of Rights? In order to have any hope of coherently answering these questions, we have to decide what is a right.

Protesters of cartoons insist Islam forbids any image of prophet Frieze depicts Muhammad among 18 "lawgivers" on wall above Supreme Court justices' bench While Muslims engaged in violent protests worldwide over caricatures of Muhammad have insisted any image of their prophet is considered blasphemous, a prominent frieze in the U.S. Supreme Court portrays the Islamic leader wielding a sword.

Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, but not because the Supreme Court presumed to legalize abortion rather than ban it. Roe was wrongly decided because abortion simply is not a constitutional issue. There is not a word in the text of that document, nor in any of its amendments, that conceivably addresses abortion. There is no serious argument based on the text of the Constitution itself that a federal "right to abortion" exists. The federalization of abortion law is based not on constitutional principles, but rather on a social and political construct created out of thin air by the Roe court.

Liberal Democrats waged an eleventh-hour attempt Monday to block Samuel Alito's Supreme Court confirmation, arguing that he would tilt the high court further to the right.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a lower court was wrong to strike down New Hampshire's parental notification law. In a unanimous decision written by retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the justices let the abortion restriction stand.

He was going to be subjected to a filibuster. Now it appears that Supreme Court Justice Nominee Samuel J. Alito, Jr. will get an up-or-down vote.

You heard it here first: Ted Kennedy, the Democrat Party mascot, is a tone-deaf alien from a distant galaxy. How else to explain his impudent inquisition into the integrity of our nation's next Supreme Court justice, the Honorable Samuel Alito? In Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week, Kennedy actually asserted that the nominee's association with a conservative Princeton alumni group two decades ago should disqualify him from a seat on the High Court.

If there is one thing to be learned from the confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, it’s that liberal Democrats will waste no opportunity to grandstand for their far left-wing even if that means being misleading with the facts, unprofessional with the questioning, and hypocritical with the insinuations. Case in point is liberal moonbat Ted Kennedy who blasted Judge Alito for being a member of an “exclusive” club of Princeton alumni without mentioning that he is a member of an “exclusive” all-male Harvard club.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in the landmark case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.” His words were a ringing affirmation of the freedoms of conscience and expression that are central to American liberty.

With abortion and executive privilege to be two huge issues facing Samuel Alito during his confirmation hearing this week, the Supreme Court nominee said Monday that a good judge always keeps an open mind and that no person is above the law.

Abortion advocates disrupted a press conference on Thursday by pro-life women's groups seeking to express their support for the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito. "True to form, advocates of so-called “choice” angrily tried to silence our choice to support Judge Alito’s fair confirmation process."

Most debate about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has focused on his propensity to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade and the similarity between him and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. But despite the superficial parallels between the two conservative, Italian-American Catholic jurists, it is important to recognize that Alito has a substantial libertarian dimension to his jurisprudence as well as a conservative one. In several key fields of law, he is more likely than Scalia and other conservatives to be skeptical of assertions of government power. More important, there is much in his record that should appeal to libertarians and -- to a lesser extent -- even left-wing liberals.

You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda - stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

Harriet Miers is never going to be grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. She is going to withdraw her name from consideration before such hearings ever begin. You can take that to the bank.

Seeking to avoid a threatened subpoena by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson revealed the contents of his private phone conversation with President Bush's chief adviser Karl Rove regarding Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers – details that largely became public later.