Amicus: A Law Review

Not to be diminished in significance by recent opinions on privacy rights and firearms, the High Court has also been exceptionally focused on other topics that are equally meaningful to the lives and livelihoods of Americans in the 21st Century. Among the more than 60 decisions issued in this term, the Justices limited the authority of the chief executive to impose environmental standards on pollu...

As discussed and predicted in the first two broadcasts, the United States Supreme Court this week changed the course not only of American jurisprudence but also the legal standards for the conduct and behavior our nation’s residents: In its dramatic reversal of nearly a half-century of legal tradition, the High Court found that the Constitution does not establish a right to abortion and related re...

The current docket of the United States Supreme Court also features thorny and controversial issues in the areas of climate change, religious liberty, and asylum seekers. Among those is the power of the executive branch to impose restrictions on the emission of so-called greenhouse gases to address our environmental problems, the meaning and import of the First Amendment’s separation of church and...

Beginning with its first hints at a constitutional right to privacy in the 1920s and continuing through its full and formal embrace of such a personal prerogative in the mid-1960s, the United States Supreme Court has identified from various sources in our founding document what one justice described as “the right to an inviolate personality” and “the right to be left alone.” That seminal doctrine...

Thirteen years ago, the United States Supreme Court said for the first time in American history that the Constitution establishes a personal right to gun ownership in the home for defensive purposes. Soon in its present term the High Court will be issuing its next, major opinion interpreting the meaning and import of the Second Amendment: The Justices are wrestling with the constitutionality of a...