How should courts respond when the legislature does not adequately fund operation of the criminal justice system and thereby denies a defendant his constitutional rights? The Supreme Court avoided answering that question Monday, but the Court cannot avoid it forever. Fifty years ago the Supreme Court held in Gideon v. …
In a unanimous opinion yesterday by Justice Stephen Breyer in Standard Fire Ins. Co. v. Knowles, the Supreme Court concluded that plaintiffs’ attorneys can’t evade federal law on class action lawsuits through a self-serving stipulation designed to keep a case in state court and out of the federal system. Like …
The House has proposed its own reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). It is an improvement over the Senate bill, but it, too, suffers from constitutional problems. As discussed in a previous Heritage posting and in a recent law review article, if enacted into law, the Senate VAWA …
The Senate-passed version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) violates Articles II and III of the Constitution. The bill would authorize Indian tribal courts to adjudicate certain domestic violence criminal charges against non-Indians and to enter a final judgment authorizing the confinement of convicted offenders. At present, tribal courts …
Everyone agrees that stealing should be a crime. Theft has been an offense in every society that has recognized property rights. Theft was a crime under the English common law; every state outlaws theft today; and theft of federal property (or property in interstate commerce) is a crime under federal …
Not many cases involving the financing of municipal sewer construction projects are likely to raise issues that might interest the Supreme Court (or anyone else for that matter), but at least one has. On Monday, the Supreme Court decided Armour v. Indianapolis, which rejected an Equal Protection Clause challenge to …
Today, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held unconstitutional a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defining “marriage” exclusively as opposite-sex unions, setting up an all-but-certain Supreme Court case for next year. Acting in response to a Hawaii Supreme Court …
