Minimum Competence

This Day in Legal History: Susan B. Anthony Votes On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony walked into a polling place in Rochester, New York, and cast a ballot in the presidential election, along with fourteen other women from her ward. This was a deliberate legal test. Anthony and other suffragists argued that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified four years earlier, made women citizens, and that voti...

This Day in Legal History: The Tehran Embassy Seizure On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage. Fifty-two of them would be held for 444 days. In response, President Jimmy Carter invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a statute Congress had passed just two years earlier, and froze billions of dollars in Iranian a...

This Day in Legal History: Elk v. Wilkins On November 3, 1884, the Supreme Court decided Elk v. Wilkins. John Elk was a Native American man, born on tribal land, who had left his tribe, moved to Omaha, and lived among the city’s residents. In 1880, he tried to register to vote. The registrar, Charles Wilkins, refused, on the ground that Elk wasn’t a citizen. Elk sued, relying on the Fourteenth Ame...

This Day in Legal History: Black Tuesday On October 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange suffered the worst day of the crash that had begun the previous Thursday. About 16 million shares changed hands, a record that stood for decades, and the Dow fell about 12 percent. Investors who had bought stock on margin, with borrowed money, were wiped out as their loans were called. The crash didn’t cause...

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This Day in Legal History: Federalist No. 1 On October 27, 1787, New York’s Independent Journal published an essay signed “Publius,” titled “General Introduction.” It was the first of what became 85 essays, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, urging New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution, which had been signed in Philadelphia just six weeks earlier. Hamilton wrote this firs...

This Day in Legal History: The O.K. Corral On October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, in the Arizona Territory, City Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and Doc Holliday confronted a group of cowboys, including Ike and Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury, near the O.K. Corral. The gunfight lasted about thirty seconds. Billy Clanton and both McLaurys were killed. Virgil, Morgan, and Hol...

This Day in Legal History: Moritz v. Commissioner On October 22, 1970, the U.S. Tax Court denied a deduction claimed by Charles Moritz, a never-married man from Denver who worked as a book editor and paid a caregiver to look after his elderly mother so he could keep working. The tax code at the time allowed a deduction for those caregiving costs to women, widowers, divorced men, and men whose wive...

This Day in Legal History: Abrams v. United States On October 21, 1919, the Supreme Court heard argument in Abrams v. United States. Jacob Abrams and several other Russian immigrants had thrown leaflets from a Manhattan building criticizing American military intervention in Russia and calling for a general strike. They were convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to as much as twent...

This Day in Legal History: The Saturday Night Massacre On the night of October 20, 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Cox had refused to accept a compromise that would have given him summaries of the White House tapes instead of the tapes themselves. Richardson had promised the Senate durin...

This Day in Legal History: Black Monday On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 508 points, or 22.6 percent, in a single day. It is still the largest one-day percentage drop in the index’s history. Markets around the world fell with it. Trading systems were overwhelmed, order books backed up, and for hours many investors had no way to know what prices they were actually ge...

This Day in Legal History: The Clayton Antitrust Act On October 15, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act. The Sherman Act of 1890 had banned contracts in restraint of trade and monopolization, but in broad language that left courts to decide case by case what was illegal. Clayton filled in specifics. It prohibited price discrimination that would substantially lessen comp...

This Day in Legal History: The Death of the Great Dissenter On October 14, 1911, Justice John Marshall Harlan died after nearly 34 years on the Supreme Court. Harlan was an unlikely civil rights hero. He was a Kentuckian from a slaveholding family who had opposed the Thirteenth Amendment before the war’s aftermath changed his views. On the Court, he became known as the “Great Dissenter” for standi...

This Day in Legal History: In re Turner On October 13, 1867, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, sitting as a circuit judge in Baltimore, decided In re Turner. Maryland had abolished slavery in its 1864 constitution, but former enslavers quickly found a workaround: a state apprenticeship law that let courts bind Black children to white employers, often their former masters, without their parents’ conse...

This Day in Legal History: The Alex Jones Verdict On October 12, 2022, a jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, ordered Alex Jones and his company to pay about $965 million to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and to an FBI agent who responded that day. For years, Jones had told his audience the massacre, in which 20 children and six educators were killed, was a ho...

This Day in Legal History: Bostock Is Argued On October 8, 2019, the Supreme Court heard argument in Bostock v. Clayton County and two companion cases. Each involved an employee fired after the employer learned the employee was gay or transgender. The question was whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employment discrimination “because of sex,” protects against discriminati...

This Day in Legal History: The Stamp Act Congress On October 7, 1765, twenty-seven delegates from nine of the thirteen American colonies met in New York City for what became known as the Stamp Act Congress. Parliament had passed the Stamp Act that spring, requiring colonists to buy stamped paper for newspapers, legal documents, licenses, and even playing cards. It was the first direct tax Parliame...

This Day in Legal History: Earl Warren Takes the Center Chair On October 5, 1953, which was the first Monday in October and the opening day of the Supreme Court’s term, Earl Warren was sworn in as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States. Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died of a heart attack less than a month earlier. To make sure the Court opened its term with a full bench, President Eisenhower...

This Day in Legal History: Thurgood Marshall Joins the Court On October 2, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren swore in Thurgood Marshall as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first Black justice in the Court’s history. President Lyndon Johnson had nominated him to replace Justice Tom Clark, and the Senate confirmed him that August by a vote of 69 to 11. Marshall arrived at the Court havin...

This Day in Legal History: The Nuremberg Verdicts On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg delivered its sentences on the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany. Of the 22 defendants, 19 were convicted and three were acquitted. Twelve were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, and four to prison terms of 10 to 20 years. Hermann Göring killed himself the night befor...

This Day in Legal History: The Integration of Ole Miss On September 30, 1962, James Meredith, a Black Air Force veteran, was escorted onto the campus of the University of Mississippi by federal marshals to enroll under a federal court order. The university had rejected him for no reason other than his race. The Fifth Circuit ordered him admitted, and Justice Hugo Black refused to let that order be...

This Day in Legal History: Congress Creates the U.S. Army On September 29, 1789—the very last day of the First Congress’s inaugural session—the House and Senate passed the act that formally established the United States Army under the new Constitution. President Washington had pressed hard for it, reminding Congress that the militia provisions inherited from the Articles of Confederation were inad...

This Day in Legal History: The Black Sox Indictment On September 28, 1920, a Chicago grand jury indicted eight members of the Chicago White Sox for conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate. That morning, pitcher Eddie Cicotte and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson had reportedly confessed. The scandal—forever after known as the “Black Sox”—remains one of the mo...

This Day in Legal History: Congress Proposes the Bill of Rights On September 25, 1789, the First Congress agreed on twelve proposed amendments to the newly ratified Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of those twelve would be ratified by the states in December 1791, and we know them today as the Bill of Rights. It was the fulfillment of a promise—many states had ratified...

This Day in Legal History: The Judiciary Act of 1789 On September 24, 1789, President George Washington signed the Judiciary Act of 1789 into law—one of the very first acts of the very first Congress, and a document that turned the skeletal promise of Article III into a functioning national court system. The Constitution had created “one supreme Court” and left everything else to Congress’s imagin...