‘DOMA’s principal effect is to identify and make unequal a subset of state-sanctioned marriages.’ — JUSTICE ANTHONY M. KENNEDY
NY Times Reporting:
DOMA
[quoteThe Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a 1996 law denying federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples is unconstitutional, in a sign of how rapidly the national debate over gay rights has shifted.
The decision was 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing the majority opinion, which the four liberal-leaning justices joined. (Read the decision.)
“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts was in the minority, as were Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The ruling overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed with bipartisan support and President Bill Clinton signed.
The decision will immediately extend some federal benefits to same-sex couples, but it will also raise a series of major decisions for the Obama administration about how aggressively to overhaul references to marriage throughout the many volumes that lay out the laws of the United States.
The court is still expected to rule Wednesday on a second case involving same-sex marriage: whether California’s ban on it is unconstitutional.
The decision on the Defense of Marriage Act does not alter any state laws governing whether same-sex couples can marry. It instead determines whether same-sex couples that are legally married in one state receive federal benefits that apply to heterosexual married couples.[/quote]
The decision was 5 to 4, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy writing the majority opinion, which the four liberal-leaning justices joined. (Read the decision.)
“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts was in the minority, as were Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The ruling overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed with bipartisan support and President Bill Clinton signed.
The decision will immediately extend some federal benefits to same-sex couples, but it will also raise a series of major decisions for the Obama administration about how aggressively to overhaul references to marriage throughout the many volumes that lay out the laws of the United States.
The court is still expected to rule Wednesday on a second case involving same-sex marriage: whether California’s ban on it is unconstitutional.
The decision on the Defense of Marriage Act does not alter any state laws governing whether same-sex couples can marry. It instead determines whether same-sex couples that are legally married in one state receive federal benefits that apply to heterosexual married couples.[/quote]
The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 on Wednesday that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstituional.
From SCOTUSblog
Roberts dissents. Scalia dissents. DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment. The opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.
From the decision: “DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty.”
SCOTUSblog quotes from the decision:
“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others.”
Justices Hold That California Opponents of Same-Sex Marriage Do Not Have Standing to Sue
SCOTUS Blog Reporting:
Prop 8
Plain English take on Hollingsworth v. Perry:
The challenge to the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage: After the two same-sex couples filed their challenge to Proposition 8 in federal court in California, the California government officials who would normally have defended the law in court, declined to do so. So the proponents of Proposition 8 stepped in to defend the law, and the California Supreme Court (in response to a request by the lower court) ruled that they could do so under state law. But today the Supreme Court held that the proponents do not have the legal right to defend the law in court. As a result, it held, the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the intermediate appellate court, has no legal force, and it sent the case back to that court with instructions for it to dismiss the case.
Usual suspects, please line up and tell us what it means: TGD, Metsfanmax, BBS, Haggis, Woodruff, PS, Lootifer, NS, et al.
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Key Part of Voting Rights Act Invalidated
NY Times Reporting:
The Supreme Court struck down a central portion of the Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, effectively ending the practice in which some states with a history of racial discrimination must receive clearance from the federal government before changing voting laws.
The vote was 5 to 4, with the five conservative-leaning justices in the majority and the four liberal-leaning justices in the minority. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the decision.
The majority held that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, originally passed in 1965 and since updated by Congress, was unconstitutional. The section includes a formula that determines which states must receive pre-approval.
The court did not strike down Section 5, which allows the federal government to require pre-approval. But without Section 4, which determines which states would need to receive clearance, Section 5 is largely without significance — unless Congress chooses to pass a new bill for determining which states would be covered.
Given the current partisan nature of Congress, reaching agreement on a new formula may be difficult.
“Section 5 of the act required states to obtain federal permission before enacting any law related to voting — a drastic departure from basic principles of federalism,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision. “And Section 4 of the act applied that requirement only to some states — an equally dramatic departure from the principle that all states enjoy equal sovereignty.”
“There is no denying, however, that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions,” he added.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the towering legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. Its central provision, Section 5, requires many state and local governments, mostly in the South, to obtain permission from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington before making changes in laws that affect voting.
That means jurisdictions covered by Section 5 must get federal approval before they make minor changes to voting procedures, like relocating a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.
The Supreme Court had repeatedly upheld the law, saying that Section 5’s “preclearance requirement” was an effective tool to combat the legacy of lawless conduct by Southern officials bent on denying voting rights to blacks.
Critics of Section 5 say it is a unique federal intrusion on state sovereignty and a badge of shame for the affected jurisdictions that is no longer justified. They point to high voter registration rates among blacks and the re-election of a black president as proof that the provision is no longer needed.
Civil rights leaders, on the other hand, say the law played an important role in the 2012 election, with courts relying on it to block voter identification requirements and cutbacks on early voting.
Section 5 was originally set to expire in five years. Congress repeatedly extended it: for five years in 1970, seven years in 1975, and 25 years in 1982. Congress renewed the act in 2006 after holding extensive hearings on the persistence of racial discrimination at the polls, again extending the preclearance requirement for 25 years.
In 2012, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a challenge to the law filed by Shelby County, Ala. Judge David S. Tatel, writing for the majority, acknowledged that “the extraordinary federalism costs imposed by Section 5 raise substantial constitutional concerns,” and he added that the record compiled by Congress to justify the law’s renewal was “by no means unambiguous.”
“But Congress drew reasonable conclusions from the extensive evidence it gathered,” he went on. The constitutional amendments ratified after the Civil War, he said, “entrust Congress with ensuring that the right to vote — surely among the most important guarantees of political liberty in the Constitution — is not abridged on account of race. In this context, we owe much deference to the considered judgment of the people’s elected representatives.”
The dissenting member of the panel, Judge Stephen F. Williams, surveyed recent evidence concerning registration and turnout, the election of black officials, the use of federal election observers and suits under another part of the law.
Some of that evidence, he said, “suggests that the coverage formula completely lacks any rational connection to current levels of voter discrimination,” while other evidence indicates that the formula, “though not completely perverse, is a remarkably bad fit with Congress’s concerns.”
“Given the drastic remedy imposed on covered jurisdictions by Section 5,” he wrote, “I do not believe that such equivocal evidence can sustain the scheme.”
The Supreme Court had once before considered the constitutionality of the 2006 extension of the law in a 2009 decision, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder. But it avoided answering the central question, and it seemed to give Congress an opportunity to make adjustments. Congress did not respond.
=================
Justices Block Law Requiring Voters to Prove Citizenship
NY Times Reporting:
Spoiler
Arizona may not require documentary proof of citizenship from prospective voters, the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-to-2 decision on Monday.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, No. 12-71, said a federal law requiring states to “accept and use” a federal form displaced an Arizona law.
The federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, allows voters to register using a federal form that asks, “Are you a citizen of the United States?” Prospective voters must check a box for yes or no, and they must sign the form, swearing under the penalty of perjury that they are citizens.
The state law, by contrast, required prospective voters to prove that they were citizens by providing copies of or information concerning various documents, including birth certificates, passports, naturalization papers or Arizona driver’s licenses, which are available only to people who are in the state lawfully.
A divided 10-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had ruled that the two sets of requirements “do not operate harmoniously” and “are seriously out of tune with each other in several ways.”
The decision from that panel effectively affirmed a 2010 ruling from a three-judge panel that included Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2006 but occasionally acts as a visiting appeals court judge. She joined the majority in ruling that the state law was inconsistent with the federal one and so could not survive.
Justice O’Connor was in the Supreme Court’s courtroom on Monday to see the announcement of the decision that affirmed the decision of the panel on which she had sat.
SCOTUS Blog reporting:
Spoiler
In 2004, Arizona voters approved a law that requires election officials in that state to refuse to register any would-be voter who cannot prove that he is in fact a citizen. Arizona residents, along with voting and civil rights groups, challenged the state law, arguing that it could not stand because it conflicted with, and was trumped by, the NVRA (National Voter Registration Act).
The Court held, in a seven-to-two decision by Justice Scalia, that Arizona’s law cannot stand in the face of the NVRA. The Court first recognized that under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the power to dictate when, where, and how elections are held, and state election laws that conflict with federal ones are therefore preempted and without effect. The Court thus held that by requiring states to “accept and use” the federal form, the NVRA effectively required the states to treat the federal form as sufficient evidence of citizenship without any additional proof, so that Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement was contrary to the NVRA, and therefore invalid. The Court recognized that the words “accept and use” do not necessarily carry such a broad meaning – they could mean only that the state was required to consider the federal form – but based on the context and the other provisions in the NVRA, the Court concluded that the requirement to “accept and use” the federal form has the stronger effect of requiring states to treat the federal form as sufficient. On the question of which legal test to apply, the Court made it clear that while preemption under the Supremacy Clause (which provides that federal law generally trumps contrary state law) requires Congress to clearly state its intent to preempt state requirements, preemption under the Elections Clause is more easily found because federal elections law will always displace state law.
Finally, the Court held that in the future, Arizona can ask the federal Election Assistance Commission, which creates the federal form, to include a requirement of additional proof of citizenship in the form, and to bring different legal challenges if the EAC refuses to do so.
Justice Kennedy drafted a separate opinion concurring in part and in the judgment; Justices Thomas and Alito each filed a dissenting opinion, arguing that Arizona’s requirement should not have been held preempted.
Full (.pdf) Supreme Court Decision
Usual suspects, please line up and tell us what it means: TGD, Metsfanmax, BBS, Haggis, Woodruff, PS, Lootifer, NS, et al.
==========
Supreme Court Rules Human Genes May Not Be Patented
NY Times reporting:
Spoiler
Human genes may not be patented, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.
“A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for a unanimous court. But manipulating a gene to create something not found in nature is an invention eligible for patent protection.
The case concerned patents held by Myriad Genetics, a Utah company, on genes that correlate with increased risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer.
The central question for the justices in the case, Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, No. 12-398, was whether isolated genes are “products of nature” that may not be patented or “human-made inventions” eligible for patent protection.
The patents were challenged by scientists and doctors who said their research and ability to help patients had been frustrated.
The court’s ruling will shape the course of scientific research and medical testing, and it may alter the willingness of businesses to invest in the expensive work of isolating and understanding genetic material.
SCOTUS Blog reporting:
Spoiler
The Court held that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but manmade cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring. The case involved the well-known BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which can involve mutations that increase the likelihood of breast cancer. The ruling is significant for a variety of companies (including Myriad) that hold important DNA patents. But for the industry as a whole, it offers the prospect of significant patent protection for cDNA, as well as other inventions derived from human DNA. Justice Scalia filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
Full (.pdf) Supreme Court Opinion[/size]
=======================
"Justices Allow Police to Take D.N.A. Samples After Arrests"
NY Times reporting:
Spoiler
WASHINGTON — Police may take D.N.A. samples from people arrested for serious crimes, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a 5-to-4 decision.
“When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s D.N.A. is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion.
Justice Antonin Scalia summarized his dissent from the bench, a rare move signaling deep disagreement.
“Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your D.N.A. can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” he said.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent. The case arose from the collection of D.N.A. in 2009 from Alonzo Jay King Jr. after his arrest on assault charges in Wicomico County, Md. His D.N.A. profile, obtained by swabbing his cheek, matched evidence in a 2003 rape case, and he was convicted of that crime. The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that a state law authorizing D.N.A. collection from people arrested but not yet convicted violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.
Collecting D.N.A. from people convicted of crimes was not at issue in the case, Maryland v. King, No. 12-207. The question was, rather, whether the Fourth Amendment allowed collecting it from people who have merely been arrested and so are presumed innocent.
BBS, Haggis, TGD, PS, Metsfanmax, et al, I am looking at you all to come in tell us what we should think about this.
--Andy
