By MICHAEL KIRKLAND
WASHINGTON, July 21 (UPI) -- If ever there was a dispute destined to land within the cool marble confines of the U.S. Supreme Court, it's the bitter fight between the Obama administration on one side and the owners of for-profit businesses who say their religious beliefs should exempt them from providing insurance coverage for contraception.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, July 14 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court, before going on recess last month, narrowed affirmative action in college admissions as much as it possibly could without killing it. A case accepted for argument next term not only threatens big trouble for what remains of race-based preferential admissions, but for gender-based admissions policies as well.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, July 7 (UPI) -- A number of states, freed from the iron cuffs of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court, are enjoying their newfound freedom in predictable ways -- merrily pursuing voter ID laws and redrawing political districts without any interference from Washington.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, June 30 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision last week striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and its companion ruling that in effect upheld the outlawing of California's Proposition 8, ignited a national conversation -- where does same-sex marriage go from here? For that matter, where does marriage go from here?
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, June 23 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court last week stepped into the national fight over voter identification requirements, and the result won't please those pushing such requirements in at least 30 states.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, June 16 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court last week dealt a devastating blow to the genetics industry -- or opened up new vistas depending on your point of view -- by ruling unanimously that naturally occurring DNA segments could not be patented.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, June 9 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court, in a huge victory for law enforcement, ruled 5-4 last week that taking a DNA sample from prisoners accused of serious crimes does not violate the Constitution.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- Do the states have the power to protect the right of unions to picket on private property even when a business owner, the property owner, doesn't want them there? The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether it wants to settle the issue when the justices sit in conference behind closed doors Thursday.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, May 19 (UPI) -- Does Islamic law, Sharia, have a place in American courts? A lot of state legislatures don't think so, and there is a large movement to ban its application in the domestic courts, state and federal.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, May 12 (UPI) -- As the entire legal affairs world knows by now, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor last month expressed a frisson of regret for the U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decision in Gore vs. Bush, a decision that appeared to decide the 2000 presidential election.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Writer
WASHINGTON, May 5 (UPI) -- It's spring, and the U.S. Supreme Court is lifting a mighty hammer. When the justices bring that big hammer down, they may change forever the way the races interact in the United States, and may forever redefine the millennia-old definition of marriage.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, April 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding under what conditions a company can patent the building blocks of life -- or in some cases the building blocks of death -- for profit.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, April 14 (UPI) -- A proposed federal regulation that would undo some of the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling has been languishing at the Securities and Exchange Commission for a year and a half, but there are signs the commission may be making a decision on it relatively soon.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- A ruling last month by a federal judge in San Francisco for the moment has removed one of the FBI's most effective tools against terrorism, or upheld the Constitution's protections against unchecked government power, depending on your point of view.
WASHINGTON, March 31 (UPI) -- While the Texas case on affirmative action in college admissions is still pending, the U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly agreed last week to hear an affirmative action case out of Michigan that promises to be a genuine mover and shaker.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, March 24 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court may be holding the political future of the United States in its hand as it tries to decide how far the states may go in requiring identification from those who attempt to vote.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, Senior UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) -- Republicans ripped the Obama administration when earlier this month it brought the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden to New York for trial instead of to Guantanamo and a military commission.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, March 10 (UPI) -- Clint Eastwood has lent his raspy-voiced, steely-eyed presence to the debate over gay marriage, signing on to a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down California's Proposition 8, which limits marriage to a man and a woman.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, March 3 (UPI) -- As the images of 20 first-graders massacred in Connecticut, of the horrific attack on former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona, of the slaughter of movie-goers in Aurora, Colo., and of numerous other mass killings in the United States fade in the national memory, the fervor to restrict access to some types of weapons and magazines appears to be abating.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- Kim Millbrook, a federal prisoner serving 31 years on a variety of charges, says on March 5, 2010, three corrections officers took him to a basement at the U.S. Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pa., where one forced him down to perform oral sex on a second officer while the third officer stood watch. He wants to sue.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 (UPI) -- Suddenly drones are everywhere -- not in the skies over the United States, as they will be in their thousands in a few years, and not just hovering over foreign battlefields to strike terror in the heart of al-Qaida -- but as the focus of debate in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- A little noticed privacy case, seemingly insignificant but with large implications on how Americans actually live, is simmering away at the U.S. Supreme Court like a pot of hot coffee.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 (UPI) -- President Obama got his nose bloodied, in the legal sense, late last month by a muscular Washington appeals court that ruled several of his recess appointments were unconstitutional -- appointments made while the U.S. Senate was in what the administration says was a recess.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- The nation marked the 40th anniversary last week of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that recognized a woman's right to an abortion -- but the debates over abortion, and over the so-called morning after pill which some consider abortion, are far from over.
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Senior Legal Affairs Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court may be getting ready to handcuff police in the nationwide fight against drunk driving, or it may be finally getting ready to enforce a basic constitutional right, depending on your point of view.
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