Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, 546 U.S. 320 (2006), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving a facial challenge to New Hampshire's parental notification abortion law. The First Circuit had ruled that the law was unconstitutional and an injunction against its enforcement was proper. The Supreme Court vacated this judgment and remanded the case, but avoided a substantive ruling on the challenged law or a reconsideration of prior Supreme Court abortion precedent. Instead, the Court only addressed the issue of remedy, holding that invalidating a statute in its entirety "is not always necessary or justified, for lower courts may be able to render narrower declaratory and injunctive relief."
H. William Burgess was an attorney who lived in Hawaii. He opposed the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and of government programs that benefit Native Hawaiians. Burgess brought two lawsuits seeking to have such programs declared unconstitutional.
Barnes-Wallace v. Boy Scouts of America was a case involving the City of San Diego's relationship with the Boy Scouts of America.
John Bruce Thompson is an American activist and disbarred attorney. As an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. Thompson gained recognition as an anti-video game activist, criticizing the content of video games and their alleged effects on children. He also targeted rap music and radio personality Howard Stern.
Arts and media industry trade groups, such as the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), strongly oppose and attempt to prevent copyright infringement through file sharing. The organizations particularly target the distribution of files via the Internet using peer-to-peer software. Efforts by trade groups to curb such infringement have been unsuccessful with chronic, widespread and rampant infringement continuing largely unabated.
Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas-Rasset was the first file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States brought by major record labels to be tried before a jury. The defendant, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, was found liable to the plaintiff record company for making 24 songs available to the public for free on the Kazaa file sharing service and ordered to pay $220,000.
Theodore H. Frank is an American lawyer, activist, and legal writer, based in Washington, D.C. He is the counsel of record and petitioner in Frank v. Gaos, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the issue of cy pres in class action settlements; he is one of the few Supreme Court attorneys ever to argue his own case. He wrote the vetting report of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for the John McCain campaign in the 2008 presidential election. He founded the Center for Class Action Fairness (CCAF) in 2009; it temporarily merged with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2015, but as of 2019 CCAF is now part of the new Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a free-market nonprofit public-interest law firm founded by Frank and his CCAF colleague Melissa Holyoak. The New York Times calls him the "leading critic of abusive class-action settlements"; the Wall Street Journal has referred to him as "a leading tort-reform advocate" and praised his work exposing dubious practices by plaintiffs' attorneys in class actions.
Keller v. State Bar of California, 496 U.S. 1 (1990), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that attorneys who are required to be members of a state bar association have a First Amendment right to refrain from subsidizing the organization’s political or ideological activities.
Alliance for Open Society International, Inc. (AOSI) is a U.S. public charity organized in 2003 under the laws of the State of Delaware.
Nader v. Brewer, 531 F.3d 1028 is a 2008 decision by the Ninth Circuit ruling that certain Arizona voting regulations were unconstitutional under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Same-sex marriage in Alabama has been legal since June 26, 2015, in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. Not all counties immediately complied with the ruling, copying behavior from the civil rights era when they had refused to perform interracial marriages. A year after the Supreme Court ruling, only twelve counties would either issue licenses to no one or only to opposite-sex couples. By 2017, this number had dropped to only eight counties, with all eight refusing to issue licenses to anyone. In May 2019, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill replacing the option that counties issue marriage licenses and perform marriage ceremonies with the requirement of counties to record marriage certificates. Subsequently, all counties complied and announced on August 29, 2019 that they would record marriage certificates for interracial and same-sex couples. Previously, Alabama had banned the licensing of same-sex marriages and the recognition of such marriages from other jurisdictions by executive order in 1996, by statute in 1998, and by constitutional amendment in June 2006.
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 564 U.S. 786 (2011), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court that struck down a 2005 California law banning the sale of certain violent video games to children without parental supervision. In a 7–2 decision, the Court upheld the lower court decisions and nullified the law, ruling that video games were protected speech under the First Amendment as other forms of media.
Florence v. Shurtleff, Civil No. 2:05CV000485, was a case in which the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah issued an order stating that individuals could not be prosecuted for posting adult content that was constitutionally protected on general access websites, nor could they be civilly liable for failing to prevent access to adult content, so long as the material is identifiable by filtering software. The order was the result of a 2005 lawsuit, The King's English v. Shurtleff, brought by Utah bookstores, artists, Internet Service Providers and the other organizations challenging the constitutionality of certain portions of a Utah law intended to protect minors from adult content.
In Brenner v. Scott and its companion case, Grimsley v. Scott, a U.S. district court found Florida's constitutional and statutory same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional. On August 21, 2014, the court issued a preliminary injunction that prevents that state from enforcing its bans and then stayed its injunction until stays are lifted in the three same-sex marriage cases then petitioning for a writ of certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court–Bostic, Bishop, and Kitchen–and for 91 days thereafter. When the district court's preliminary injunction took effect on January 6, 2015, enforcement of Florida's bans on same-sex marriage ended.
Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U.S. 582 (2016), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court announced on June 27, 2016. The Court ruled 5–3 that Texas cannot place restrictions on the delivery of abortion services that create an undue burden for women seeking an abortion. On June 28, 2016, the Supreme Court refused to hear challenges from Wisconsin and Mississippi where federal appeals courts had struck down similar laws. Other states with similar laws may also be impacted.
Mississippi House Bill 1523, also called the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act or Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, is 2016 state legislation passed in direct response to federal rulings in support of same-sex marriage. MS H.B. 1523 provides protections for persons, religious organizations, and private associations who choose to provide or withhold services discriminatorily in accordance to the three "deeply held religious beliefs or moral convictions" which are specifically outlined in the bill. These protected beliefs are 1) that marriage is and should be an exclusively heterosexual union, 2) sex should not occur outside of marriage, and 3) that biologically-assigned sex is objective and immutably linked to gender.
State of Washington and State of Minnesota v. Trump, 847 F.3d 1151, was a lawsuit that challenged the lawfulness and constitutionality of Executive Order 13769, an executive order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Frank v. Gaos, 586 U.S. ___ (2019), was a per curiam decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in a case concerning the practice of cy pres settlements in class action lawsuits. Following oral argument, the court asked the parties to submit supplemental briefs addressing whether the parties had Article III standing to pursue the case in federal courts. Supplemental briefing was completed on December 21, 2018. On March 20, 2019, the court remanded the case to the Ninth Circuit to address the plaintiffs’ standing in light of Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins.
NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton is a lawsuit by trade association of technology and internet-based businesses challenging Texas House Bill 20 that forbade social media companies with more than 50 million users from censoring certain user content along with restricting ability of email providers to filter content except where illegal, obscene or contains malicious code.
Patrick Casey Pitts is an American lawyer from California who is a nominee to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
