Sandra Day O'Connor was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. O'Connor was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. A moderate conservative, O'Connor was known for her precisely researched opinions. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she was considered a swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the first four months of the Roberts Court. Before O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was an Arizona state judge and earlier an elected legislator in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate.
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."
Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court split on the First Amendment issue of local school boards removing library books from junior high schools and high schools. Four Justices ruled that it was unconstitutional, four Justices concluded the contrary, and one Justice concluded that the court need not decide the question on the merits. Pico was the first Supreme Court case to consider the right to receive information in a library setting under the First Amendment, but the court's fractured plurality decision left the scope of this right unclear.
Adderley v. Florida, 385 U.S. 39 (1966), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding whether arrests for protesting in front of a jail were constitutional.
Pamela Susan Karlan is an American legal scholar who was the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice from February 8, 2021 until July 1, 2022. She is a professor at Stanford Law School. A leading legal scholar on voting rights and constitutional law, she previously served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Voting Rights in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2015.
Naomi Lynn Reice Buchwald is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., 564 U.S. 552 (2011), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a Vermont statute that restricted the sale, disclosure, and use of records that revealed the prescribing practices of individual doctors violated the First Amendment.
M.L.B. v. S.L.J., 519 U.S. 102 (1996), was a Supreme Court of the United States case regarding a controversy over the Fourteenth Amendment. The petitioner, M.L.B., argued that the Mississippi Chancery Courts could not terminate her parental rights on the basis that she was unable to pay the court fees. M.L.B. had been sued by S.L.J. to terminate M.L.B.'s parental rights and gain the ability to adopt the children. The judge declared in favor of S.L.J. under the premise that the decree was fair, as it was based on the fulfilling of the burden of proof by the father and his second wife with "clear and convincing evidence."
Board of Trustees of Scarsdale v. McCreary, 471 U.S. 83 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case in which an evenly split Court upheld per curiam a lower court's decision that the display of a privately sponsored nativity scene on public property does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Executive Order 13769 was signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on January 27, 2017, and quickly became the subject of legal challenges in the federal courts of the United States. The order sought to restrict travel from seven Muslim majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The plaintiffs challenging the order argued that it contravened the United States Constitution, federal statutes, or both. On March 16, 2017, Executive Order 13769 was superseded by Executive Order 13780, which took legal objections into account and removed Iraq from affected countries. Then on September 24, 2017, Executive Order 13780 was superseded by Presidential Proclamation 9645 which is aimed at more permanently establishing travel restrictions on those countries except Sudan, while adding North Korea and Venezuela which had not previously been included.
Executive Order 13768 titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States was signed by U.S. President Donald Trump on January 25, 2017. The order stated that "sanctuary jurisdictions" including sanctuary cities that refused to comply with immigration enforcement measures would not be "eligible to receive Federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes" by the U.S. Attorney General or Secretary of Homeland Security.
Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976), is a United States Supreme Court decision regarding political speech of public employees. The Court ruled in this case that public employees may be active members in a political party, but cannot allow patronage to be a deciding factor in work related decisions. The court upheld the decision by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the respondent.
Donald Trump's use of social media attracted attention worldwide since he joined Twitter in May 2009. Over nearly twelve years, Trump tweeted around 57,000 times, including about 8,000 times during the 2016 election campaign and over 25,000 times during his presidency. The White House said the tweets should be considered official statements. When Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 during the final days of his term, his handle @realDonaldTrump had over 88.9 million followers. On November 19, 2022, Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, reinstated his account, although Trump has stated he will not use it in favor of his own social media platform, Truth Social. The first tweet since 2021 was made in August 2023 about his mugshot from Fulton County Jail, but the account has since remained inactive.
Trump v. Hawaii, No. 17-965, 585 U.S. ___ (2018), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case involving Presidential Proclamation 9645 signed by President Donald Trump, which restricted travel into the United States by people from several nations, or by refugees without valid travel documents. Hawaii and several other states and groups challenged the Proclamation and two predecessor executive orders also issued by Trump on statutory and constitutional grounds. Citing a variety of statements by Trump and administration officials, they argued that the proclamation and its predecessor orders were motivated by anti-Muslim animus.
Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 928 F.3d 226 (2019), is a case at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on the use of social media as a public forum. The plaintiffs, Philip N. Cohen, Eugene Gu, Holly Figueroa O'Reilly, Nicholas Pappas, Joseph M. Papp, Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, and Brandon Neely, are a group of Twitter users blocked by U.S. President Donald Trump's personal @realDonaldTrump account. They alleged that Twitter constitutes a public forum, and that a government official blocking access to that forum is a violation of the First Amendment. The lawsuit also named as defendants White House press secretary Sean Spicer and social media director Dan Scavino.
Derrick Johnson is an American lawyer and humanitarian. He serves as the 19th President and CEO of the NAACP. He had previously served as president of its Mississippi state chapter, and vice chairman of its board of directors. Johnson is the founder of the Mississippi nonprofit group One Voice Inc., which aims to improve quality of life for African Americans through public engagement.
The Oversight Board is a body that makes consequential precedent-setting content moderation decisions on the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, in a form of "platform self-governance".
Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, 594 U.S. ___ (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case involving eminent domain and labor relations. In its decision, the Court held that a regulation made pursuant to the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that required agricultural employers to allow labor organizers to regularly access their property for the purposes of union recruitment constituted a per se taking under the Fifth Amendment. Consequently, the regulation may not be enforced unless “just compensation” is provided to the employers.
Houston Community College System v. Wilson, 595 U.S. ___ (2022), is a United States Supreme Court case involving the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The unanimous Court held that a local government board member's freedom of speech was not abridged when he was verbally censured by his colleagues.
Phyllis Joycelyn Randall is an American politician and mental-health therapist. A Democrat, she is chair at-large of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, Virginia and the first African-American woman to chair a county board in Virginia. She was also the defendant in a notable 2019 lawsuit, Davison v. Randall, in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the First Amendment precludes government officials from blocking constituents on official government social media accounts.
