By Alex Simard (PO’22) Mere hours after signing a measure to avoid a second government shutdown, President Trump declared a National Emergency in order to advance his campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border. A litigious storm followed the announcement as advocacy groups amassed and began contemplating how exactly to block the President’s emergency declaration in the...
By Isaac Cui (PO ’20), Managing Editor The Supreme Court yesterday acted on Bobby Moore’s death penalty case and ordered that Moore cannot be executed because of his intellectual disability.[1] It was a small step on an arcane issue, one that does not fundamentally change the Court’s capital punishment jurisprudence. But it was nevertheless a moral victory for our Constitution. In 2002, the...
By Cameron Miller (Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at ASU ’17) Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a noted sports fan, served on the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for thirteen years before being nominated to the Supreme Court. During his tenure on the D.C. Circuit, numerous sports-related disputes came before then-Judge Kavanaugh; six of these cases and...
By Rafael Santa Maria (PO ’20) A grisly capital murder case might determine the constitutionality of the insanity defense. In 2009, James Kraig Kahler shot and killed his wife, his mother-in-law, and his own two daughters in Burlingame, Kansas. After being found guilty and facing a capital murder conviction, Kahler appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn his death...
By Melia Wong (CMC ’19) On the evening of August 30th, 1945, reporters crowded the Overseas Bureau of the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and demanded to meet the infamous “Tokyo Rose.”[1] The few employees who remained at the station were bewildered to see the Americans—with automatic weapons at their sides—storming in to the small network office before the war had officially ended...
By Daisy Ni (PO ’21) Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has long been a controversial figure. He, alongside with his site, are best known for their release of 25,000 cables of classified government information stolen by former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Since then, Assange has had a strained relationship with the U.S. government. President Trump, for example, has...
By James Dail (CMC ’20) One of the main issues at the heart of the Kavanaugh hearings is the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that established that women have a right to an abortion. That Kavanaugh may provide the pivotal swing vote to overturn Roe, given that the vote takes place at all after recent sexual assault allegations, is arousing strong passions on both...
By Frankie Konner (PZ ’21) Carpenter v. US is one of the most important cases regarding the Fourth Amendment that the Supreme Court has heard in decades. The case, most likely to be decided in June 2018, focuses on the government’s right to access cell phone location data. The discussion brought about by Carpenter v US includes important issues such as the role precedents from the last 50...
By Bryce Watchell (PO ’21) Last week’s post outlined the origin of corporate personhood, dating all the way back to the early 19th century, when Dartmouth College sought Constitutional protections afforded to individuals up until that point. Then, following Society for Propagation of Gospel v. Town of Pawlet and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the grounds for corporate...
By Bryce Watchell (PO ’21) “Corporate personhood” sounds like an oxymoron, and yet it is a fundamental component of the American judicial system. The Supreme Court time and time again has affirmed that corporations have rights in many capacities: they can own property, sue and be sued, enter into binding contracts, and be held liable in a court of law. However, these abilities are not unlimited:...
