The Supreme Court, joined by a history-making new Justice but deeply immersed in controversy that has put its future in serious question, begins a new term on Monday. With the public allowed back into the Court’s hearings for the first time in two and a half years, the spectators will see the first black woman… Read More

A year and eight months after Donald Trump left the White House, carrying with him a large trove of documents that he had no right to take, the controversy is still far from being sorted out.  Here are the most important questions still unanswered: Why did he take what he took?  Where did he put… Read More

Voters in Kansas, among the most conservative in the nation, bluntly ordered their state legislature on Tuesday not to take away a woman’s right to abortion – guaranteed since 2019 under the state constitution. As of early this morning, with 96.7 percent of the votes counted, a measure proposed by the legislature seeking authority to… Read More

A constitutional right that has some of its origins in the famous Great Charter (“Magna Carta”) in 13th Century England has been a source over many decades of some of the most important rights enjoyed by Americans.  It is the somewhat opaque “right of due process,” a basic guarantee that protects people from arbitrary government… Read More

Continuing its energetic campaign to narrow the power of federal regulatory agencies, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Thursday stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of authority to write industry-wide curbs on emission of air pollution by electricity-generating plants. Without a specific new grant of authority from Congress, the Court’s 6-to-3 decision declared, EPA must mainly… Read More

The Supreme Court today took on the dramatic and historic assignment of ruling on the power of state legislatures to exercise unchecked control over elections for Congress and the Presidency.  At the center of that constitutional controversy is the theory that President Trump and his allies used in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election… Read More

Pushing religion further into the midst of American public life, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled on Monday that a teacher or coach has a constitutional right to pray during a public school event. The 6-to-3 majority continued its energetic campaign to revise the modern Constitution by overruling liberal precedents, as it had done just… Read More

For the first time in the nation’s 233-year history, the Supreme Court on Friday erased a constitutional right.  Five of the Court’s conservative Justices joined to overrule Roe v. Wade and also a later ruling that reinforced that basic decision. What that means, and the Court majority said this was exactly what it intended, is… Read More

With much of the nation deeply worried over gun violence and with even a usually reluctant Congress ready to take some action, the Supreme Court by a 6-to-3 vote on Thursday created a new, broad and difficult-to-limit constitutional right to carry a concealed firearm in public. It took the Justices five opinions totaling 135 pages… Read More

Sharply narrowing the remaining constitutional separation between government and religion, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that public money grants cannot be denied to parents just because they will use it to pay for religious education of their children. The 6-to-3 decision, in a case from Maine, goes considerably further than the Court had ever gone… Read More