Article Three of the United States Constitution establishes the judicial branch of the federal government. Under Article Three, the judicial branch consists of the Supreme Court of the United States, as well as lower courts created by Congress. Article Three empowers the courts to handle cases or controversies arising under federal law, as well as other enumerated areas. Article Three also defines treason.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws which regulate an establishment of religion, or that would prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments. This amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the United States Bill of Rights. The Amendment serves as a limitation upon the federal government to impose unduly harsh penalties on criminal defendants before and after a conviction. This limitation applies equally to the price for obtaining pretrial release and the punishment for crime after conviction. The phrases in this amendment originated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the exclusionary rule, which prevents prosecutors from using evidence in court that was obtained by violating the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, applies not only to the federal government but also to the states. The Supreme Court accomplished this by use of a principle known as selective incorporation; in Mapp this involved the incorporation of the provisions, as interpreted by the Court, of the Fourth Amendment which is applicable only to actions of the federal government into the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause which is applicable to actions of the states.
Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court holding that the First Amendment prevented the conviction of Paul Robert Cohen for the crime of disturbing the peace by wearing a jacket displaying "Fuck the Draft" in the public corridors of a California courthouse.
The Preamble to the United States Constitution, beginning with the words We the People, is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution's fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Courts have referred to it as reliable evidence of the Founding Fathers' intentions regarding the Constitution's meaning and what they hoped the Constitution would achieve.
Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with whether living organisms can be patented. Writing for a five-justice majority, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger held that human-made bacterium could be patented under the patent laws of the United States because such an invention constituted a "manufacture" or "composition of matter". Justice William J. Brennan Jr., along with Justices Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, and Lewis F. Powell Jr., dissented from the Court's ruling, arguing that because Congress had not expressly authorized the patenting of biological organisms, the Court should not extend patent law to cover them.
In the law of the United States, diversity jurisdiction is a form of subject-matter jurisdiction that gives U.S. federal courts the power to hear lawsuits that do not involve a federal question. Diversity jurisdiction requires two conditions to be met: first, there must be "diversity of citizenship" between a lawsuit's parties, meaning the plaintiffs must be citizens of different U.S. states than the defendants; and second, the lawsuit's "amount in controversy" must be more than $75,000. If a lawsuit does not meet these conditions, U.S. federal courts will normally lack the power to hear it unless it involves a federal question, and the lawsuit would need to be heard in state court instead.
Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U.S. 398 (1964), was a United States Supreme Court case that determined that the policy of United States federal courts would be to honor the Act of State Doctrine, which dictates that the propriety of decisions of other countries relating to their internal affairs would not be questioned in the courts of the United States.
Statutory interpretation is the process by which courts interpret and apply legislation. Some amount of interpretation is often necessary when a case involves a statute. Sometimes the words of a statute have a plain and a straightforward meaning. But in many cases, there is some ambiguity in the words of the statute that must be resolved by the judge. To find the meanings of statutes, judges use various tools and methods of statutory interpretation, including traditional canons of statutory interpretation, legislative history, and purpose. In common law jurisdictions, the judiciary may apply rules of statutory interpretation both to legislation enacted by the legislature and to delegated legislation such as administrative agency regulations.
Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is primarily based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.
Taylor v. United States, 495 U.S. 575 (1990), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that filled in an important gap in the federal criminal law of sentencing. The federal criminal code does not contain a definition of many crimes, including burglary, the crime at issue in this case. Yet sentencing enhancements applicable to federal crimes allow for the enhancement of a defendant's sentence if he has been convicted of prior felonies. The Court addressed in this case how "burglary" should be defined for purposes of such sentencing enhancements when the federal criminal code contained no definition of "burglary." The approach the Court adopted in this case has guided the lower federal courts in interpreting other provisions of the criminal code that also refer to generic crimes not otherwise defined in federal law.
International Association of Machinists v. Street, 367 U.S. 740 (1961), was a United States labor law decision by the United States Supreme Court on labor union freedom to make collective agreements with employers to enroll workers in union membership, or collect fees for the service of collective bargaining.
Polar Tankers, Inc. v. City of Valdez, 557 U.S. 1 (2009), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving the tonnage clause of the United States Constitution.
Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. 593 (2010), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States holding that the machine-or-transformation test is not the sole test for determining the patent eligibility of a process, but rather "a useful and important clue, an investigative tool, for determining whether some claimed inventions are processes under § 101." In so doing, the Supreme Court affirmed the rejection of an application for a patent on a method of hedging losses in one segment of the energy industry by making investments in other segments of that industry, on the basis that the abstract investment strategy set forth in the application was not patentable subject matter.
Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293 (1967), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that held that a pretrial identification not covered by the Sixth Amendment right to counsel should be excluded if it was so unnecessarily suggestive as to violate due process.
Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon, 515 U.S. 687 (1995), is a US Supreme Court case, decided by a 6–3 vote, in which the plaintiffs challenged the Interior Department's interpretation of the word "harm" in the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717 (1961), full title Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property at 104 East Tenth Street, Kansas City, Missouri, is an in rem case decided by the United States Supreme Court on the seizure of obscene materials. The Court unanimously overturned a Missouri Supreme Court decision upholding the forfeiture of hundreds of magazines confiscated from a Kansas City wholesaler. It held that both Missouri's procedures for the seizure of allegedly obscene material and the execution of the warrant itself violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments' prohibitions on search and seizure without due process. Those violations, in turn, threatened the rights protected by the First Amendment.
Communist Party of the United States v. Subversive Activities Control Board, 351 U.S. 115 (1956) and 367 U.S. 1 (1961), was a federal court case in the United States involving the compelled registration of the Communist Party of the United States, under a statute requiring that all organizations determined to be directed or controlled by the "world Communist movement" publicly disclose detailed information as to their officers, funds, and membership.
Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court construed 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a provision added to the federal criminal code by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to criminalize the destruction or concealment of "any record, document, or tangible object" to obstruct a federal investigation. By a 5-to-4 vote, the Court stated that the term "tangible object" as used in this section means an object used to record or preserve information, and that this did not include fish.
