Kenesaw Mountain Landis was an American jurist who served as a United States federal judge from 1905 to 1922 and the first commissioner of baseball from 1920 until his death. He is remembered for his resolution of the Black Sox Scandal, in which he expelled eight members of the Chicago White Sox from organized baseball for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series and repeatedly refused their reinstatement requests. His iron rule over baseball in the near quarter-century of his commissionership is generally credited with restoring public confidence in the game.
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law enacted on June 15, 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18 : 18 U.S.C. ch. 37.
Victor Luitpold Berger was an Austrian–American socialist politician and journalist who was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America. Born in the Austrian Empire, Berger immigrated to the United States as a young man and became an important and influential socialist journalist in Wisconsin. He helped establish the so-called Sewer Socialist movement, but also sparked the American Socialist Party's nativist turn. In 1910, he was elected as the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that a prosecutor's use of a peremptory challenge in a criminal case—the dismissal of jurors without stating a valid cause for doing so—may not be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. The Court ruled that this practice violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case gave rise to the term Batson challenge, an objection to a peremptory challenge based on the standard established by the Supreme Court's decision in this case. Subsequent jurisprudence has resulted in the extension of Batson to civil cases and cases where jurors are excluded on the basis of sex.
In United States federal law, the Daubert standard is a rule of evidence regarding the admissibility of expert witness testimony. A party may raise a Daubert motion, a special motion in limine raised before or during trial, to exclude the presentation of unqualified evidence to the jury. The Daubert trilogy are the three United States Supreme Court cases that articulated the Daubert standard:
Moore et al. v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled 6–2 that the defendants' mob-dominated trials deprived them of due process guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It reversed the district court's decision declining the petitioners' writ of habeas corpus.
Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455 (1942), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that denied counsel to indigent defendants prosecuted by a state. The reinforcement that such a case is not to be reckoned as denial of fundamental due process was famously overruled by Gideon v. Wainwright. In the dissent, Justice Hugo Black famously opined that "A practice cannot be reconciled with "common and fundamental ideas of fairness and right which subjects innocent men to increased dangers of conviction merely because of their poverty."
Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 (1975), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to refuse counsel and represent themselves in state criminal proceedings.
United States v. Glaxo Group Ltd., 410 U.S. 52 (1973), is a 1973 decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that (1) when a patent is directly involved in an antitrust violation, the Government may challenge the validity of the patent; and (2) ordinarily, in patent-antitrust cases, "[m]andatory selling on specified terms and compulsory patent licensing at reasonable charges are recognized antitrust remedies."
William F. Kruse (1894–1979) was an important head of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) in the 1910s. He was a member of the Socialist Party of America until 1921, acting as a leader of the party's Left Wing faction, loyal to the Third International (Comintern). Thereafter he joined the Workers Party of America, serving as assistant executive secretary of the WPA from the time of its foundation in December 1921.
Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009), is a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires judges to recuse themselves not only when actual bias has been demonstrated or when the judge has an economic interest in the outcome of the case but also when "extreme facts" create a "probability of bias."
Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that it was a violation of the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation for a prosecutor to submit a chemical drug test report without the testimony of the person who performed the test. While the court ruled that the then-common practice of submitting these reports without testimony was unconstitutional, it also held that so called "notice-and-demand" statutes are constitutional. A state would not violate the Constitution through a "notice-and-demand" statute by both putting the defendant on notice that the prosecution would submit a chemical drug test report without the testimony of the scientist and also giving the defendant sufficient time to raise an objection.
Hollingsworth v. Perry was a series of United States federal court cases that re-legalized same-sex marriage in the state of California. The case began in 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which found that banning same-sex marriage violates equal protection under the law. This decision overturned California ballot initiative Proposition 8, which had banned same-sex marriage. After the State of California refused to defend Proposition 8, the official sponsors of Proposition 8 intervened and appealed to the Supreme Court. The case was litigated during the governorships of both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, and was thus known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger and Perry v. Brown, respectively. As Hollingsworth v. Perry, it eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which held that, in line with prior precedent, the official sponsors of a ballot initiative measure did not have Article III standing to appeal an adverse federal court ruling when the state refused to do so.
The Supreme Court of the United States handed down nine per curiam opinions during its 2001 term, which began October 1, 2001, and concluded October 6, 2002.
Baker v. Wade 563 F.Supp 1121, rev'd 769 F.2nd 289 cert denied 478 US 1022 (1986) is a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the sodomy law of the state of Texas. Plaintiff Donald Baker contended that the law violated his rights to privacy and equal protection. After a victory at trial, an appellate court reversed the lower court's decision and in the wake of its decision in Bowers v. Hardwick the Supreme Court of the United States refused to review it.
The Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in New York City from 1949 to 1958 were the result of US federal government prosecutions in the postwar period and during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) were accused of violating the Smith Act, a statute that prohibited advocating violent overthrow of the government. The defendants argued that they advocated a peaceful transition to socialism, and that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech and of association protected their membership in a political party. Appeals from these trials reached the US Supreme Court, which ruled on issues in Dennis v. United States (1951) and Yates v. United States (1957).
Sacher v. United States, 343 U.S. 1 (1952), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the convictions of five attorneys for contempt of court.
Ham v. South Carolina, 409 U.S. 524 (1973), was a United States Supreme Court decision concerning examinations of prospective jurors during voir dire. The Court held that the trial court's failure to "have the jurors interrogated on the issue of racial bias" violated the petitioner's due process right under the Fourteenth Amendment. This right does not extend to any question of bias, but it does not preclude questions of relevant biases.
Evans v. Hettich, 20 U.S. 453 (1822), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a witness's testimony could not be objected to merely because the witness suffered from "fits of derangement", as long as the witness was sane when he testified.
Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465 (1976), was decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that limited which claims of Fourth Amendment violations could be made by state prisoners in habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. Specifically, a claim that the exclusionary rule had been broken would be barred if state courts had already given it a full and fair hearing. The decision combined two cases that were argued before the Supreme Court on the same day with similar issues, one filed by Lloyd Powell and the other, titled Wolff v. Rice, filed by David Rice.
