Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an abortion. The decision struck down many abortion laws, and it sparked an ongoing abortion debate in the United States about whether, or to what extent, abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, and what the role of moral and religious views in the political sphere should be. The decision also shaped debate concerning which methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication.
Hugo Lafayette Black was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.
Harlan Fiske Stone was an American attorney and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and then as the 12th chief justice of the United States from 1941 until his death in 1946. He also served as the U.S. Attorney General from 1924 to 1925 under President Calvin Coolidge, with whom he had attended Amherst College as a young man. His most famous dictum was that "Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern."
John Marshall Harlan was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1955 to 1971. Harlan is usually called John Marshall Harlan II to distinguish him from his grandfather, John Marshall Harlan, who served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911.
William Burnham Woods was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. An appointee of President Rutherford B. Hayes, he served from 1881 until 1887. He wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Harris, involving the constitutionality of the Ku Klux Klan Act, and Presser v. Illinois, involving the application of the Second Amendment to the states; both cases adopted a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He dissented rarely and wrote mostly uncontroversial opinions, and he has been largely forgotten by history.
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated to the high court by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served on it since January 31, 2006. After Antonin Scalia, Alito is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
John Glover Roberts Jr. is an American jurist serving since 2005 as the 17th chief justice of the United States. He has been described as having a moderate conservative judicial philosophy, though he is primarily an institutionalist. Regarded as a swing vote in some cases, Roberts has presided over an ideological shift toward conservative jurisprudence on the high court, in which he has authored key opinions.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is the highest appellate court in Wisconsin. The Supreme Court has jurisdiction over original actions, appeals from lower courts, and regulation or administration of the practice of law in Wisconsin.
In July 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. However, following the death of Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, that still-pending nomination was withdrawn. On September 5, 2005, President Bush announced that he would nominate Roberts to succeed Rehnquist as Chief Justice instead.
In U.S. Supreme Court history, "The switch in time that saved nine" is the phrase—originally a quip by humorist Cal Tinney—about what was perceived in 1937 as the sudden jurisprudential shift by Associate Justice Owen Roberts in the 1937 case West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. Conventional historical accounts portrayed the Court's majority opinion as a strategic political move to protect the Court's integrity and independence from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's court-reform bill, also known as the "court-packing plan", but later historical evidence gives weight to Roberts' decision being made immediately after oral arguments, much earlier than the bill's introduction. The term itself is a reference to the aphorism "a stitch in time saves nine", meaning that preventive maintenance before something breaks is less work than fixing that thing after it breaks.
The Supreme Court of the United States is the only court specifically established by the Constitution of the United States, implemented in 1789; under the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Court was to be composed of six members—though the number of justices has been nine for most of its history, this number is set by Congress, not the Constitution. The court convened for the first time on February 2, 1790.
Neil Patrick Crooks was an American lawyer. He was a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1996 until his death in 2015. He was appointed as a county judge by a Democratic governor, later professing conservatism as a Supreme Court candidate in 1995 and 1996. In his later years, Crooks gained notice as a perceived judicial moderate and swing vote on a court otherwise divided into two ideological blocs.
The Roberts Court is the time since 2005 during which the Supreme Court of the United States has been led by John Roberts as Chief Justice. Roberts succeeded William Rehnquist as Chief Justice after Rehnquist's death.
Hawker v. New York, 170 U.S. 189 (1898), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a New York state law preventing convicted felons from practicing medicine, even when the felony conviction occurred before the law was enacted.
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is an American attorney and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He was nominated to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, and sworn in on February 18, 1988. After the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he was considered the swing vote on many of the Roberts Court's 5–4 decisions.
Brian Keith Hagedorn is an American lawyer and a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, serving since 2019. Prior to his election to the supreme court, he served four years as a judge on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.
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 enjoined the enforcement of similar laws.
June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that a Louisiana state law placing hospital-admission requirements on abortion clinics doctors was unconstitutional. The law mirrored a Texas state law that the Court found unconstitutional in 2016 in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (WWH).
On February 25, 2022, President Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to the position of associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to fill the vacancy by Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement on January 27, 2022, at the age of 83. Jackson, a former law clerk of Breyer, was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, having been appointed by Biden in 2021. Jackson is the first Black woman in U.S. history to be nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
