Case Name What Happened? Majority Ruling/ Decision of the Court and why? Brandenburg v. Ohio Cohen v. California Clarence Brandenburg the leader of a KKK group gave a public speech in which he invited news reporters and photographers to film. In the speech declared that revenge could be taken against if the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court continued to suppress the Caucasian race. Brandenburg was convicted of violating the Ohio Criminal Syndication statue for advocating the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform and for voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach of advocate the doctrine of criminal syndicalism. Paul Robert Cohen wore a jacket bearing the words Fuck the Draft while walking down a hallway in the Los Angeles County Courthouse. Women and children were present. Cohen was arrested and accused of maliciously and willfully disturbing the peace The court unanimously held that freedoms of speech and press given in the First and Fourteenth Amendments did not permit a state to forbid advocacy of the use of force of law violations except where such advocacy was directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless actions as was likely to incite or produce such action. The Ohio Criminal Syndicalism statue was found unconstitutional as it punished for merely advocacy. In a 5 to 4 vote the court reversed Cohen s conviction. His jacket was meant to convey a message to the public. Cohen was conviction was unconstitutional as he was conveying a message in a constitutionally protected way. If the people found it Significance The case expanded the First Amendment freedoms and signified the final step in the development of a constitutional test for speech advocating illegal actions. In distinguishing between the advocacy of political ideas, the Court only restricted speech that was likely to incite illegal actions and to result in imminent danger. Because the test required finding of actual imminent harm, the result of this opinion is that state government may restrict speech only in unusual circumstances. This decision expanded the definition of free speech and found that language can be considered obscene only when it is linked with sex Aftermath/How did it change the way things are done? The Court s position regarding free speech in political context was clarified by its decision to protect politically relevant speech. The Court s distinction between speech that imparts ideas and speech that incited lawless action further reinforced its position in this area. The standards developed by this case are still used as a test today. Cohen expanded the constitutional protection for provocative thoughts. The Court subsequently invalidated a number of breach of peace statues.
and quiet of the neighborhood by offensive conduct, he was convicted and sentences to 30 days in jail offensive they should avert their eyes. Banning certain words is unconstitutional because that would lead to the banning of the expression of unpopular opinions West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette Katz v. United States The West Virginia Board of Education adopted a resolution ordering a regular salute to the U.S. Marie and Gathie Barnette, who were Jehovah s Witnesses, were expelled from school for refusing to salute the flag. The parents of the expelled children had been prosecuted for causing the failure to salute but the district courts refused to enforce the regulations. The school board brought the case to the supreme court FBI agents arrested and convicted Charles Katz for violation of a federal statute that outlawed interstate transmission of bets or wagers by wire. The agents obtained evidence by attaching an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of a public telephone booth where agents suspected that The majority of the Court found that the regulation requiring students to salute the flag violated the plaintiff s rights to freedom of religion. In order not to confine the issue to one freedom of religion, the Supreme court also decided that the regulation was unconstitutional because it violated the right to freedom of speech. They reasoned that the state had no power to force individuals to believe or confess particular political views The Supreme Court held that the FBI had violated the Fourth Amendment because it governs not only seizure of tangible items but extends as well to the recording of oral statements overheard without any technical trespass under local property law. The government s activities violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied The case outlined the right not to speak. It emphasized the importance of freedom of thought, which includes freedom of religion and expression The Court soundly rejected the proposition that the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches and seizures extended only to physical trespass into constitutionally protected areas. This case is often cited often to support freedom of expression The development of the reasonable expectations of privacy standard has excluded much evidence but the court did not address the need for a warrant in the use of binoculars or telescopes to view private activity as a result many courts have admitted such evidence.
Katz had been making illegal transactions while using the telephone booth and this constituted a search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The found that the electronic search was unreasonable. The FBI ignored the procedures of antecedent justification violating the Fourth Amendment. New Jersey v. TLO 14 year old freshman T.L.O. was caught smoking cigarettes in the lavatory at her New Jersey High School. When questioned by the VP about this T.L.O. denied she smoked at all. When the VP searched her he found cigarettes, a small portion of marijuana, rolling paper, plastic bags, a list of students who owed T.L.O. money, and a wad of dollar bills, among other things. The Court handed down three rulings 1. The Court held that the 4 th Amendment which prohibited unreasonable searches and seizures by state officers, is not limited to law enforcement authorities. This applies to school officers to. The 4 th Amendment, therefore, prohibits school officers from unduly interfering in students privacy and protects students from school official encroachment. 2. Schoolchildren have the legitimate expectations of privacy that society recognizes and that the law will protect. On the other hand, schools have equally legitimate expectations for maintaining order in an environment conducive to education. The Court found that the legality The decision is significant on two levels. First, the majority opinion clearly states that the 4 th Amendment applies to public school officials. This was the death knell for the loco parentis doctrine and establishes the proper standard to govern student searches in public schools. Second, the minority opinion by Justice Stevens addresses the dangers of arbitrarily interpreting the Constitution. He writes that doing so runs counter to the principles of liberty and justice for all. Some believe that the enunciated legal standard for student searches is inconsistent with precedent, will increase unjustified student searches and elevate confusion among school administrators and courts, and will decrease exclusionary rule applications. This group believes it runs contrary to the probable cause standard. Other point out that it merely loosened the probable cause standard because the Court failed to define what reasonable grounds were.
Texas v. Johnson During the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Johnson burned an American flag in the course of a political demonstration. He was protesting the policies of the Reagan Administration and some Dallas based corporations. No one was hurt, although some witnesses were offended by the act. Johnson was found to have violated a Texas criminal statute that prohibited the desecration of a state or national flag in a manner that would seriously offend observers. of a student search should be depend on reasonableness, under all the circumstances. Two factors make up what constitutes reasonableness under all circumstances : (1) whether the search was justified at its inception, and (2) whether the search was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justified the interference in the first place. 3. The court ruled that the search by the VP was not unreasonable as it met the test. The Court ruled that Johnson s conduct of burning the flag was a legitimate political expression protected by the 1 st Amendment because the conduct was politically motivated. Furthermore, there was no compelling governmental interest asserted by the state in limiting the conduct on basis of preventing breaches of the peace. Only if the flag burning actually sought to cause imminent lawless action could the government take preventative measures. The flag is a potent political symbol whose use cannot be limited because of differing opinions. This case clarified and expanded the 1 st Amendment free expression protections. It established that the government cannot enact laws prohibiting political expression relating to the flag without a legitimate governmental interest. Because of the Constitution s commitment to individual freedoms, the flag as a symbol can be used for political discourse regardless of a given act s offensiveness. This ruling resulted in political uproar. Congress rushed to introduce legislation that would outlaw flag burning. The Flag Protection Act made the abusing of the flag a criminal act. This was found to be unconstitutional in the 1990 U.S. v. Eichman case
Marbury v. Madison John Adams in his final days in office tried to entrench the Federalist by appointing 16 new circuit judges and 42 new justices of the peace for the District of Columbia. Commissions for four of the new justices of the peace, including William Marburg, were not delivered before Adam s last day in office. The new president s secretary of state James Madison refused to give the four their commissions. Marbury asked the Supreme Court to issue a writ of mandamus ordering him to do so. The case presented a dilemma for Chief Justice Marshall, a committed Federalist whom Adams had named chief justice immediately after his electoral defeat. If the Supreme Court issued the order, Madison might refuse, and the Court had no means to enforce compliance. If the Court did not issue the write, it risked surrendering judicial power to Jefferson and the Republicans Marbury s action was discharged because the Court did not have original jurisdiction. The Judiciary Act enacted by the Congress to give the Court the power to issue a writ of mandamus was contrary to the Constitution and unconstitutional. It established the theory of Judicial review. In more recent times, the Court has asserted a broad judicial review power, claiming the responsibility of being the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution. Once a law is declared unconstitutional, the courts simply decline to enforce it.
Plessy v. Ferguson Korematsu v. United States Homer Plessy bought a firstclass ticket to travel from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana. At the time the trains were segregated. He took a seat in the white passenger car and took a vacant seat. A police officer was summoned and Plessy was forced to leave to coach. He was jailed in New Orleans for violating the Jim Crow laws of Louisiana which separated which separated blacks and white trains. Fred Korematsu was an American Citizen of Japanese ancestry. He lived in Alameda County, California, his entire life. Soon after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Mr. Korematsu volunteered for military service, but was rejected for health reasons. When the relocation orders were issued, Mr. Korematsu chose not to leave his home. He was arrested tried and convicted for violating the exclusion order. A federal court sentenced him to 5 years imprisonment but immediately paroled him and he was sent to an internment camp. Mr. Korematsu appealed his conviction arguing that the In an 8-1 vote the Court ruled that laws permitting, and even requiring, the separation of persons by race do not imply the inferiority of either race to one another. Distinctions based on skin color has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the races. There was a distinction between laws that interfere with political equality for the negro and those that required the separation of races in schools, theaters, and railroad cars. The Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion order. The perceived possibility of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was enough for the Court s majority to justify ordering American citizens to abandon their homes and surrender to military authorities. The court refused to consider the exclusion order together with the order that Japanese Americans were to report to assembly or relocation centers, and then be subject to interment camps This encouraged legislators in the South to pass Jim Crow laws, which intensified the segregation of blacks and whites, the disenfranchisement of black votes, and other violations of the civil rights of blacks The Korematsu v. United States was the first case in which the Supreme Court used the strict scrutiny test to review a law that classified people on the basis of race. Since Korematsu, strict scrutiny review has afforded racial minorities significantly more protection than it did Fred Korematsu For more than 60 years, the Supreme Court regarded separate but equal as an appropriate interpretation of the law with regard to the civil rights of black citizens In 1983 the case was reopened in federal district court in San Francisco. His conviction was overturned. In 1988, Congress passed legislation to help all victims of the internment program. Those interned were paid $20,000 each.
exclusion order violated his constitutional rights by discriminating against him and other Japanese Americans on the basis of their race. Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas In Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s, schools were segregated by race. Each day, Linda Brown and her sister had to walk through a dangerous railroad switchyard to get to the bus stop for the ride to their all-black elementary school. There was a school closer to the Brown's house, but it was only for white students. Linda Brown and her family believed that the segregated school system violated the Fourteenth Amendment and took their case to court. In an unanimous decision in favor of Brown. The Court found that Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon colored children. Also, they directed the district court courts to monitor the good faith of the local school boards in planning and implementing desegregation plans. The parties to the case should be admitted to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed. The decision wiped out legally sanctioned segregation in almost every aspect every aspect of American life, even outlawing in 1967 state laws barring interracial marriage. In the immediate aftermath of the second Brown decision, the South sought to use tokenism to meet the letter of the law while negating the spirit. District courts frequently granted delays and accepted the enrollment of handfuls of black school Children into formally white schools. In 1957, Little Rock Arkansas Black students attempted to desegregate Central High School. The U.S. President sent U.S. Army troops to enforce the court orders. Desegregation picked up speed after the passage of the 1960 Civil Rights Act. By 1972 over 46 percent of black children in the South were attending schools in which the majority of students were white.
Mapp v. Ohio Suspicious that Dollree Mapp might be hiding a person suspected in a bombing, the police went to her home in Cleveland, Ohio. They knocked on her door and demanded entrance, but Mapp refused to let them in because they did not have a warrant. After observing her house for several hours, the police forced their way into Mapp's house, holding up a piece of paper when Mapp demanded to see their search warrant. As a result of their search, the police found a trunk containing pornographic materials. They arrested Mapp and charged her with violating an Ohio law against the possession of obscene materials. At the trial the police officers did not show Mapp and her attorney the alleged search warrant or explain why they refused to do so. Nevertheless, the court found Mapp guilty and sentenced her to jail. After losing an appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court, Mapp took her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court determined that evidence obtained through a search that violates the Fourth Amendment is inadmissible in state courts. This is a keystone in the Warren Court s criminal procedure revolution during which the Court significantly expanded criminal defendants procedural safeguards. Police departments and prosecutors became very sensitive to following strict procedural guidelines for search warrants. In the aftermath of Mapp, criminal suspects were protected in both federal and states courts from illegal police searches, and prosecutors were not allowed to use unconstitutionally seized evidence to convict defendants.
Miranda v. Arizona Tinker v. Des Moines Ernesto Miranda was arrested after a crime victim identified him, but police officers questioning him did not inform him of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, or of his Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of an attorney. While he confessed to the crime, his attorney later argued that his confession should have been excluded from trial. John and Mary Beth Tinker of Des Moines, Iowa, wore black armbands to their public school as a symbol of protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Besides the armbands Tinker and the others has been passive and nondisruptive. When school authorities asked that the Tinkers remove their armbands, they refused and were subsequently suspended for violating regulations that prohibited the wearing of armbands at school. The Court ruled that the prosecution may not use statements stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendants unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards to secure the privilege against self-incrimination. The decision spelled out these in the Miranda warning that needs to be read by the police officer prior to any questioning after a person has been taken into custody. The Court held that the regulation violated Tinker s constitutional rights. It found that students and teachers do not shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. In the absences of a substantial interference with the operation of the school the regulation was offensive to the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. This is probably the bestknown of the Warren Courts criminal procedure revolution. The students right to free expression was upheld. The Court in Tinker explicitly declined to deal with the constitutionality of school regulations dealing with hair length, clothing type, and other aspects of personal appearance, which arguably have an expressive content. The speed and ease with which the term Miranda warning entered everyday speech demonstrate the effect of the decision. The warning was adopted nearly verbatim from Chief Justice Warren s opinion. Miranda was prosecuted and convicted again on the original charge without the use of the confession as evidence. Six years later the Court ruled that schools may suspend a student for misconduct only after providing some fair procedures for determine whether the misconduct actually occurred. In New Jersey v. T.L.O. the court refused to require schools to obtain a warrant to search lockers. A search was constitutional when there were reasonable grounds for suspecting that it would turn up evidence and when the search itself was not excessively intrusive. One year later the Court upheld the right of school officials to suspend a student for lewd
Roe v. Wade Jane Roe was an unmarried and pregnant Texas resident in 1970. Texas law made it a felony to abort a fetus unless on medical advice for the purpose of saving the life of the mother. Roe filed suit against Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, contesting the statue on the grounds that it violated the guarantee of personal liberty and the right to privacy implicitly guaranteed in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In deciding for Roe, the Supreme Court invalidated any state laws that prohibited first trimester abortions speech given in a student assembly. In 1988 it ruled that school official could censor student articles in a school newspaper if the paper was published as part of the school s curriculum United States v. Nixon A congressional hearing about President Nixon s Watergate break-in scandal revealed that he had installed a taperecording device in the Oval Office. The special prosecutor in charge of the case wanted access to these taped discussions to help prove that President Nixon and his aides had abused their power and broken the law. President The Court ruled that the tapes had to be turned over to the district court for an inchamber inspection by the judge. The case was appropriately before the Court as executive privilege flows form the Constitution and the Court is the ultimate interpreter of the Constitution. Privilege was presumptive not absolute and While the outcome of the case was unfavorable to Nixon, United States v. Nixon expanded the power of the presidency. It was the first time the Supreme court acknowledged that executive privilege exists; the decision thus resolved of controversy over the constitutionality of that privilege. 12 days after the decision, the president made an abridged transcript of the tapes available to the public. 15 days after the decision Nixon resigned.
Nixon s incomplete compliance with the special prosecutor's demands was challenged and eventually taken to the Supreme Court of the United States. might be overcome in certain cases by the legitimate needs of the judicial process. Regents of University of California v. Blakke Hazelwood School District v Kuhlmeier In the early 1970s, the medical school of the University of California at Davis devised a dual admissions program to increase representation of disadvantaged minority students. Allan Bakke was a white male who applied to and was rejected from the regular admissions program, while minority applicants with lower grade point averages and testing scores were admitted under the specialty admissions program. Bakke filed suit, alleging that this admissions system violated the Equal Protection Clause and excluded him on the basis of race Hazelwood East High School Principal Robert Reynolds procedurally reviewed the Spectrum, the school s studentwritten newspaper, before publication. In May 1983, he decided to have certain pages pulled because of the sensitive content in two of the articles, and acted quickly to remove The Supreme Court found for Bakke against the rigid use of racial quotas, but also established that race was a permissible criteria among several others. The Supreme Court decided that Principal Reynolds had the right to such editorial decisions, as he had legitimate pedagogical concerns. The significance of the Bakke decision stems from what it did not do. It did not finally resolve the constitutionality of affirmative action programs. It was a complex compromise that strictly held only Allan Bakke was to be admitted to the Davis medical School. The Court did not a firm rule explaining how race can constitutionally be taken into account in school admission and hiring decisions. In 1997, California outlawed affirmative action programs. School official retained the ultimate control what constituted responsible journalism in a school sponsored newspapers. Allan Bakke was admitted to the University of California Davis Medical School and graduated in 1982.
them in order to meet the paper s publication deadline. The journalism students felt that this censorship was a direct violation of their First Amendment rights. Lemon v. Kurtzman A Pennsylvania statute allowed public schools to purchase secular educational services from nonpublic schools and reimburse the nonprofit school. However, these reimbursements were limited by requirements that the reimbursement could be paid only for secular subjects and that all materials must be approved by the superintendent. Alton J. Lemon and others argued that the Pennsylvania act violated the first and 14 th Amendment. The court ruled that aid to parochial schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. A threepart test which came to be known as the Lemon test for determining if a state violated the establishment clause was put into effect: 1. It must have a secular purpose 2. Its principal effect must not advance or inhibit religion 3. It must not foster an excessive governmental entanglement with religion The Lemon v. Kurtzman decision became the standard by which all subsequent statues involving a churchstate interaction were judged. However, the Court has been inconsistent in the manner in which the Lemon test was applied Religion cases have been decided without the threepart test and without setting objective standards against which government actions is to be judged