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Judge Merrick Garland, Barack Obama's choice to be the next justice on the Supreme Court, ruled against Priests for Life in a case involving the HHS mandate. He also gave ObamaCare subsidies a second chance at life in a separate case. The two rulings give a window into the philosophy of Judge Garland, whom the National Organization for Women referred to as a “cipher” with little paper trail on issues related to abortion or other feminist concerns. ObamaCare's HHS mandate opt-out does not violate the Constitution Priests for Life sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over...

President Barack Obama's nominee to fill the vacancy on the United States Supreme Court once joined an opinion that rejected an evangelical Christian defense based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was recently tapped by President Obama as a nominee to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. In a case decided in June 2001, Judge Garland joined an opinion authored by fellow appellate judge A. Raymond Randolph that rejected a RFRA argument for a pair of evangelical Christians who wanted to...

After a long battle in the courts, pro-lifers in North Carolina will finally be allowed to display their support for unborn babies on their license plates. On Thursday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the “Choose Life” license plates that state lawmakers approved in 2011 are constitutional, according to WRAL. The battle over the North Carolina pro-life plates went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, LifeNews reported. In June 2015, the high court ordered the 4th Circuit Court, which previously struck down the law, to reconsider the case in light of the Supreme...

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rejected a plea Thursday to block a contentious air pollution rule for power plants, in a big victory for the Obama administration. Roberts’s order came despite his court’s 5-4 decision last year ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulation, known as mercury and air toxics standards, is illegal. Michigan led a group of 20 states last month, empowered by the Supreme Court’s recent unprecedented decision to halt the EPA’s climate change rule for power plants, in asking the court to live up to its ruling last year and block the regulation’s enforcement. “Unless...

A Louisiana judge has ruled unconstitutional a new state law requiring priests to report sexual abuse that is mentioned in a sacramental confession. Judge Mike Caldwell made his ruling in a long-running and complicated case in which Father Jeff Bayhi had been directed to testify about what a young woman reportedly told him in a confession. The young woman has said that she told Father Bayhi about being molested by a member of his parish. Father Bayhi had refused to testify, citing the inviolability of the confessional seal. Judge Caldwell ruled that the state law making priests mandated reporters of...

A New York judge will hear arguments on Tuesday in a lawsuit that challenges Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s ability to run for president given that he was born in Canada. State Supreme Court Justice David Weinstein will hear the claim of two men who contend that Cruz is not a citizen of the U.S. and is therefore ineligible to run for president, NBC has reported. Cruz was born in Alberta, Canada. Barry Korman and William Gallo will argue that despite Cruz’s mother being an American, the senator is not a citizen because such status cannot be passed from parent to...

A U.S. District judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to record police unless the video is meant to be used as evidence. Judge Mark Kearney made the ruling against Philadelphians Richard Fields and Amanda Geraci, whose cameras were confiscated by police while the two were recording the officers breaking up a house party. The Third Circuit judge ruled that unless police are recorded with the "stated purpose of being critical of the government," any such video isn't protected speech.

(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday allowed Louisiana to enforce a restrictive 2014 abortion law critics say is aimed at shutting clinics, ending a halt to the measure handed out by a lower court judge earlier this year. The Louisiana-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a request from the state to put into effect the law requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles (48 km) of the place where the abortion is performed. "We reversed the district court and permitted the law to go into effect...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The Iowa Supreme Court says a stun gun, under Iowa law, is a dangerous weapon. The court made the conclusion as it affirmed the conviction of a woman charged with carrying a dangerous weapon after police found a stun gun in her purse in 2013 during an arrest for theft at a Waterloo Walmart. Taquala Howse, who is 25, appealed saying her small hand-held stun gun isn’t dangerous. A district judge convicted Howse, finding the state had proven it was dangerous.

As the nation and official Washington prepared to mourn the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, watchers of the high court began to assess the immediate impact of his death on several pending cases whose decisions might have had momentous political implications. Among these is Friedrichs v. California Teacher’s Association, set to have been a landmark case regarding the mandatory collection of union dues and their use for political purposes. The ruling could have meant the death knell of collective bargaining and the political might of America’s unions. newzf After oral arguments in the case in January, The Washington Post...

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday at the age of 79, wrote many notable opinions and dissents during his 30 years on the bench. But there is one case that stands out: Scalia's 2008 majority decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down a Washington, DC, handgun ban and led to a slew of lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of gun control. "It was the first Supreme Court decision to authoritatively interpret the Second Amendment. It is rare for [a] justice to write on a constitutional issue where there is no prior case law," UCLA law professor...

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump says he does not agree with comments from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia questioning the efficacy of affirmative action. "I don't like what he said, no, I don’t like what he said. I heard him, I was like, 'Let me read it again,' because I actually read it in print, and I’m going, I read a lot of stuff, and I’m going, 'Woah,'" Trump said in an interview televised Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." The billionaire said he thought Scalia's comments were "very tough to the African-American community." Trump, who has supported affirmative...

Kentucky clerk Kim Davis has obeyed orders to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the months since she spent five nights in jail for refusing to do so, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. United States District Judge David Bunning denied the American Civil Liberties Union's request to order Davis to reissue licenses she had altered to remove her name and title or face the possibility of further punishment. He found that Davis has allowed her deputies to issue licenses to anyone eligible since September and that the altered licenses are likely valid under Kentucky law. ...

FULL TITLE - Federal court deals blow to gun reformers saying people have 'fundamental right' to own assault weapons in rejection of Maryland law A federal court said that assault weapons are in such "common use" that owning them is a "fundamental right" in a decision that could force the Supreme Court to rule on whether the firearms are legal. On Thursday, a three-judge federal panel dealt a blow to anti-gun violence advocates when they rejected portions of a Maryland gun reform law. The legislation was passed following the Sandy Hook massacre which claimed the lives of 20 children and...

In a major victory for gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court on Thursday sided with a broad coalition of gun owners, businesses and organizations that challenged the constitutionality of a Maryland ban on assault weapons and other laws aimed at curbing gun violence. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the state's prohibition on what the court called "the vast majority of semi-automatic rifles commonly kept by several million American citizens" amounted to a violation of their rights under the Constitution. "In our view, Maryland law implicates the core protection of the...

The U.S. Supreme Court, which delivered major rulings in 2012 and 2015 preserving President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, on Tuesday declined to take up a new, long-shot challenge to Obamacare brought by an Iowa artist. The court turned away an appeal by Matt Sissel, who had asserted that the 2010 Affordable Care Act violated the U.S. Constitution's requirement that revenue-raising legislation must originate in the House of Representatives, not in the Senate, as the healthcare law did.

U.S. Supreme Court United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898) United States v. Wong Kim Ark No. 18 Argued March 5, 8, 1897 Decided March 28, 1898 169 U.S. 649 APPEAL FROM THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA Syllabus A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or...

An all-girls Catholic prep school in Massachusetts violated state anti-discrimination law by rescinding a job offer to a man in a same-sex marriage, a judge ruled. Matthew Barrett was offered a job as Fontbonne Academy's food services director in 2013, but the offer was withdrawn days later after he listed his husband as his emergency contact. Barrett sued, alleging that the Milton school discriminated against him based on sexual orientation and gender. Norfolk Superior Court Judge Douglas Wilkins agreed, rejecting Fontbonne's claim that hiring Barrett would infringe on its constitutional rights because it views his marriage to a man as...

Part 295 of 293 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wisconsin — Four and a half months after it declared Wisconsin's political John Doe investigation unconstitutional and ordered it shut down, the state Supreme Court is ready to say whether it will reconsider its ruling. The court announced Tuesday it will release a per curiam, or unanimous, opinion and two orders related to the John Doe matter Wednesday. On July 16, the court ordered an end to the politically motivated investigation into conservative groups in Wisconsin that dragged on for years. Writing for the majority on the court, Justice...

US District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer ruled Wednesday against the Obama administration's motion to dismiss the case. Collyer said House Republicans do have the standing to pursue their challenge, which argues that the Obama administration violated the US Constitution by spending money on the law that had not been appropriated by Congress.