Michael Arnheim

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, ending nearly 50 years of a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. The decision allows individual states the ability to set their own abortion laws, banning or restricting the procedure as they see fit.The nation was expecting the landmark decision due to a leaked draft of the Supreme Court's deliberations in the related case Dobbs v.

The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1967, made some arrangements about the presidency and vice presidency. Most of the 25th Amendment addresses points like who replaces the US president if he dies while in office or resigns, how to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency, and how a president can temporarily transfer powers to the vice president in the event he cannot discharge his duties.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes famously remarked that, “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and our property under the Constitution.” The Chief Justice was right to point out that the meaning of the Constitution keeps changing as a result of judicial interpretation and reinterpretation, without any change in the words on paper.

The Constitution emerged from a meeting called the Philadelphia Convention, which took place in 1787. (That meeting has since come to be known also as the Constitutional Convention.) The Convention was held because the Articles of Confederation — the document that had been serving as the country’s first governing constitution — were considered to be weak and problematic.

Marbury v. Madison established the U.S. Supreme Court’s right of judicial review — the power to strike down a law as unconstitutional. William Marbury was appointed a Justice of the Peace by outgoing President John Adams. But the new Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to deliver Marbury’s commission — the formal document of appointment.

In Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools throughout the United States. In so doing, the Court declared 17 state laws unconstitutional, including some from northern states. The Court also overturned its own 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that had approved the “separate but equal” formula, which had said that it was okay to provide separate facilities for the different races as long as those facilities were equal.

These two affirmative action cases, both brought against the University of Michigan, were decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on the same day, with opposite outcomes. The Court upheld the use of race as an admissions factor while condemning the use of a quota system. So the affirmative action but non-quota-based admissions policy in force in the Law School was upheld, while the “points” system applied for undergraduate admissions was condemned.

Susette Kelo lost her lovely old house. The City of New London, Connecticut, had condemned her home and 114 other lots in a working-class neighborhood in the interests of “economic development.” However, the beneficiaries of this program weren’t the public at large, but Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, and a property development corporation — a private entity.

This case is the flip side of Nixon v. Fitzgerald. In that case, the high court ruled that the President is totally immune from civil suits for anything he does in his official capacity. In this later case, a unanimous high court held that the President is not immune from suit for anything that he did before he became president — and that such private lawsuits can go ahead even while the President is still in office.