Week 2 EOC: Supreme Court

Definition: The Supreme Court of the United States (abbreviated Scotus since 1879)[1] is the highest federal court in the United States. It has ultimate (and largely discretionary) appellate jurisdiction over all federal courts and over state court cases involving issues of federal law, plus original jurisdiction over a small range of cases.

This week, with the rest of the government shut down in a political deep freeze, the high court, being deemed essential, is open for business. It is the opening of the new term for the Supreme Court Justices.

Docket Case #1- Campaign Finance

At the top of the list is a case to be argued this week is challenging aggregate limits on campaign contributions. In the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the court upheld an earlier version of these contribution limits. In the case, the court drew a line between contributions to candidates and parties, on the one hand, and expenditures by independent groups, on the other.

Since 1976, the court has repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of limits on contributions, stating that unlimited contributions create the potential for corruption or the appearance of corruption. Challengers to campaign finance restrictions are now seeking to obliterate that line, and there is reason to believe that the conservative majority may agree.

Docket Case #2- Abortion

While there is no direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, there are cases that would allow the court to chip away at the right to abortion.

The first case is a review of Massachusetts’ so-called buffer zone law, which prohibits protests within 35 feet of abortion clinics, and could have implications for similar laws in Colorado and Montana. As Rosanna Cavallaro, a law professor at Suffolk University, recently told the Associated Press, the case will weigh the free speech rights of antiabortion protesters against a woman’s right to seek abortion services free from obstruction, threats and physical harm.

The second case involving medical abortion, while receiving less public attention than recent high-profile antiabortion laws like North Dakota’s ban on abortion at six weeks and Texas’ omnibus law, could have major implications for non-surgical abortion and may determine the new fault lines of abortion access in the United States.

Docket Case #3- Civil Rights

After last term's shrug on affirmative action, it's back — in a way. This term, the court is not being asked to decide whether affirmative action policies are permissible in higher education. Instead, in a case from Michigan, the question is whether voters can use a referendum to ban affirmative action in higher education.

The Fair Housing Act faces a challenge in another civil rights case. The federal appeals courts have, for decades, uniformly approved the use of statistics to prove that minorities are being treated differently. Because proving discriminatory intent is difficult, statistics have been used to enforce civil rights statutes by proving that a particular action has a discriminatory effect on minorities. In a Fair Housing Act case before the court, the challengers are contending that statistics are not enough to prove discrimination.

The issue I have chosen to state my opinion on is the “buffer zone law.” The decision to get rid of this law would be a bad one. I agree that abortion protesters need to be kept at a certain distance from someone who is entering a clinic. They are already in a state of distress, and do not deserve to be verbally assaulted by protesters. This crosses into the boundaries of assault.

At the end of her article titles “Abortion’s Back on the Supreme Court Docket,”  Natasha Hakimi states, “Let’s hope this new term that started Monday won’t be remembered for limiting women’s rights nationwide.”