OVERVIEW
The Supreme Court's 2009-2010 term produced one landmark ruling, the 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections. In other important cases, the court decided that the Second Amendment's protections for gun owners extends to states and local laws, and put limits on the use of the "honest services" law that has become a common part of federal corruption cases.
The Citizens United decision by a bitterly divided court overruled two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations. The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.
The decision came roughly halfway through a term dominated by cases concerning corporations, compensation and the financial markets that was notable mainly for what it signaled about the justices' attitude toward regulatory constraints at a time of extraordinary government intervention in the economy.
In a rare rebuke to the justices, President Obama attacked the Citizens United decision at his State of the Union address in January 2010. Although it is not unusual for presidents to disagree publicly with Supreme Court decisions, they tend to do so at news conferences and in written statements. Before he began his attack on the decision, Mr. Obama added a few words that had not been in his prepared text. The new preface — “with all due deference to separation of powers” — seemed to acknowledge that he was aiming unusual rhetorical fire at several Supreme Court justices sitting right in front of him. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. responded in a speech in March that the scene at the speech was “very troubling” and that the State of the Union had “degenerated to a political pep rally” and suggested that perhaps the justices should not attend.
The profile of the court led by Chief Justice Roberts is fundamentally changed. Judicial minimalism is gone, and the court has entered an assertive and sometimes unpredictable phase.
That will only intensify with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, a 35-year veteran of the court and the leader of its liberal wing, and his replacement by Elena Kagan.
Chief Justice Roberts, who joined the court in 2005, took control of it this term, pushing hard on issues of core concern to him, including campaign finance, gun rights and criminal procedure, even as he found common ground with his colleagues, including some liberals, on an array of other issues.
The court's newest addition, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, arrived in August 2009, replacing Justice David H. Souter. Justice Sotomayor did almost nothing to alter the court’s ideological balance. Some liberals had feared that her experience as a prosecutor would make her skeptical of some claims from criminal defendants, but she voted in a reliably liberal direction in those and other cases. Her first major dissent was in a case narrowing Miranda rights.
ORDERS ISSUED
Second Amendment
The Supreme Court ruled on June 28 that the Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly limit "the right to keep and bear arms." The 5-4 decision involved a challenge to Chicago’s gun control law, regarded as among the strictest in the nation.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the majority, said the court did not mean to cast doubt on laws prohibiting possession of guns by felons or the mentally ill, those forbidding carrying guns in sensitive places like schools and government buildings or those regulating the commercial sale of firearms.
The ruling came almost exactly two years after the court first ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns in District of Columbia v. Heller, a case that addressed only federal laws.
Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. They said the Heller decision remains incorrect and added that they would not have extended its protections to state and local laws even had it been correctly decided.
Sarbanes-Oxley
Also on June 28, the justices unanimously rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law, which sought to reform corporate America in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals.
But in a 5-to-4 split, the court found that the way members of the accounting oversight board could be removed was unconstitutional.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board will continue as before, but the Securities and Exchange Commission will now be able to remove board members at will.
Patent Law
In a case watched closely by the business community, the court upheld a ruling that allows business methods to be patented, in a case about a system for hedging against energy cost changes.
The plaintiffs in the case, Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw, tried to patent a system that institutions like businesses and schools could use to hedge the seasonal risks of buying energy. The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied their 1997 application for a patent, and they filed suit.
Though the justices unanimously declared that the process at issue in the case could not be patented, the decision closed off no options to patent seekers.
The narrow question at issue in the case was whether a patent should be granted on processes that did not meet what was known as the “machine or transformation” test — that is, the process was not tied to a particular machine or did not change a particular article into a different state or thing.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in saying that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was wrong to declare in 2008 that the “machine or transformation” test was the only appropriate test for patenting a process.
"Honest Services"
On June 24, the court dramatically narrowed the scope of a law often used by federal prosecutors in corruption cases.
The justices were unanimous in calling at least the broadest interpretation of the law, which makes it a crime “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services,” unconstitutionally vague. The decisions call into question the convictions of Jeffrey K. Skilling, a former chief executive of Enron, the Houston energy company, and Conrad M. Black, the newspaper executive convicted of defrauding his media company, Hollinger International.
The court sent both cases back to the lower courts.
Three members of the court, Justice Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy, would have gone further than the majority and struck down the law entirely.
By a separate 6-to-3 vote, the justices rejected a second challenge from Mr. Skilling, who said that he had not received a fair trial in Houston in 2006, given the widespread prejudice against Enron.
Aid to Terrorist Organizations
Rejecting a First Amendment challenge, the Supreme Court on June 21 upheld a federal law that bars providing “material support” to terrorist organizations.
The decision was the court’s first ruling on the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, said the ban on providing some forms of intangible assistance to terrorist groups did not violate the First Amendment. The case referred to the dozens of groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench. He wrote that the majority had been too credulous in accepting the government’s argument that national security concerns required restrictions on the challengers’ speech, and “failed to insist upon specific evidence, rather than general assertion.”
In his dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Breyer concluded that the majority “deprives the individuals before us of the protection the First Amendment demands.”
Takings Clause
A project to restore eroded beaches in the Florida Panhandle did not violate the Constitution’s takings clause even though the state claimed ownership of the strip of land the project created next to the ocean, the Supreme Court ruled on June 17.
The vote was 8 to 0 against property owners who challenged a ruling of the Florida Supreme Court that had, as they put it, turned oceanfront property into ocean-view property.
Though the justices agreed on the proper result, they were deeply divided about how to reach it.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court’s four-member conservative wing, would have used the case to establish the possibility of a “judicial taking” even as he said no such thing had happened here.
Four justices said it was unwise to reach the issue of whether courts, like the other two branches of government, are subject to the limitations in the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”).
Justice John Paul Stevens, who owns an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., did not participate in the decision.
Privacy Rights
A California police department did not violate the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it audited the text messages on a pager the city had issued him, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on June 17 in the case City of Ontario v. Quon.
The decision represented only a preliminary effort to define public employees’ Fourth Amendment rights in the digital era, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the court, took pains to say that it was narrow and closely tied to the facts.
Still, the decision puts government employees on notice that electronic communications on devices provided to them may not be subject to the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches, as long as their employers have “a legitimate work-related purpose” for inspecting the communications.
Deportation Rule in Minor Drug Cases
Immigrants who are legally in the United States need not be automatically deported for minor drug offenses, the Supreme Court ruled on June 14 in a unanimous decision.
In 2004, Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo was sentenced by a Texas state court judge to 20 days in jail for possession of less than two ounces of marijuana. The next year, he was sentenced to 10 days in jail for having a single tablet of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, without a prescription.
Lower courts had said that Mr. Carachuri-Rosendo, a permanent resident of the United States, was subject to mandatory deportation for the second drug offense.
The question in the case was whether that second offense amounted to an “aggravated felony.” If it did, the government had no choice but to deport him under the immigration laws. If it did not, the attorney general had the discretion to show leniency.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for seven justices, said the interactions of the various state and federal laws in the case required analysis of a “maze of statutory cross-references” and a 2006 decision, Lopez v. Gonzales, that rooted the definition of “aggravated felony” in federal law even when state offenses were involved.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in separate concurrences, voted with the majority but declined to adopt its reasoning in the case, Carachuri-Rosendo v. Holder, No. 09-60.
Capital Punishment
A death-row inmate in Florida was given a second chance to argue that an otherwise strict one-year filing deadline should not apply to him, in light of his lawyer’s inaccessibility and incompetence. The vote was 7 to 2.
The case concerned an unusually diligent and savvy inmate, Albert Holland, and an uncommunicative lawyer, Bradley Collins, who was appointed to handle Mr. Holland’s habeas corpus challenges to his murder conviction and death sentence.
Mr. Holland complained to the Florida Supreme Court in June 2004 of “a complete breakdown in communications,” saying he had not seen or spoken to his lawyer in 14 months and felt abandoned. He asked for a new lawyer.
Florida prosecutors responded that Mr. Holland was not allowed to communicate with the court directly because he was represented by counsel, an argument accepted by the court. In a concurrence on June 14, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. called that ruling perverse.
The question in the case was whether Mr. Collins’s conduct was sufficient to suspend a deadline in a 1996 law limiting death penalty litigation. The court did not decide that question, but it said the appeals court had used too narrow a standard in saying that a lawyer’s negligence was never enough.
Justice Breyer’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
Justice Alito largely agreed but said the majority had not laid down a clear standard of its own.
Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented. He said the court was powerless under the Constitution to rewrite the law.
Miranda Protections
Criminal suspects seeking to protect their right to remain silent must speak up to invoke it, the Supreme Court ruled on June 1, refining the court’s landmark 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that split along familiar ideological lines, did not disturb Miranda’s requirement that suspects be told they have the right to remain silent. But he said courts need not suppress statements made by defendants who received such warnings, did not expressly waive their rights and spoke only after remaining silent through hours of interrogation.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her first major dissent, said the decision “turns Miranda upside down” and “bodes poorly for the fundamental principles that Miranda protects.”
The decision followed two in February that also narrowed and clarified the scope of the Miranda decision. One allowed police officers to vary the wording of the warning; the other allowed a second round of questioning of suspects who had invoked their rights so long as two weeks had passed since their release from custody.
Youthful Offenders and Sentencing
The Supreme Court on May 17 ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Five justices, in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, agreed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids such sentences as a categorical matter.
The ruling marked the first time that the court excluded an entire class of offenders from a given form of punishment outside the context of the death penalty.
The overall vote was 6-to-3, though that is a little misleading. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. voted with the majority in saying that the inmate who brought the appeal had received a sentence so harsh that it violated the Constitution. But the chief justice endorsed only a case-by-case approach, saying that an offender’s age could be considered in deciding whether a life sentence was so disproportionate to the crime as to violate the Eighth Amendment.
The case involved Terrance Graham, who in 2003, at age 16, helped rob a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for that crime. The next year, at 17, Mr. Graham and two 20-year-old accomplices committed a home invasion robbery. In 2005, a judge sentenced Mr. Graham to life for violating his probation.
Justice Kennedy, who was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said both national and international practices supported the court’s ruling.
Justice Thomas said the majority was wrong about the facts in the United States and abroad and wrong as a matter of principle to take account of international opinion. Justice Antonin Scalia joined all of Justice Thomas’s dissent and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. most of it.
Sex Offenders
In a broad endorsement of federal power, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress has the authority under the Constitution to allow the continued civil commitment of sex offenders after they have completed their criminal sentences.
The challenge to the civil commitment law was brought by five prisoners. The case of Graydon Comstock was typical. In November 2006, six days before Mr. Comstock was to have completed a 37-month sentence for receiving child pornography, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales certified that Mr. Comstock was a sexually dangerous person.
An appellate court ruled that none of the powers granted to Congress in the Constitution empowered it to authorize such civil commitments. But the decision was stayed, and Mr. Comstock has remained confined in a federal prison.
The 7-to-2 decision reversing the lower court decision touched off a heated debate among the justices on a question that has lately engaged the Tea Party movement and opponents of the new health care law: What limits does the Constitution impose on Congress’s power to legislate on matters not specifically delegated to it in Article I?
At the argument of the case in January, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said the law was needed “to run a criminal justice system that does not itself endanger the public.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for himself and four other justices, said the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause provided Congress with the needed authority as long as the statute in question was “rationally related to the implementation of a constitutionally enumerated power.”
Two justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Anthony M. Kennedy, voted to uphold the law but did not adopt Justice Breyer’s general approach.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, dissented in the case, United States v. Comstock, No. 08-1224.
Campaign Finance and Free Speech
On Jan. 21, 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.
The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.
The decision will be felt most immediately in this fall's midterm elections. It came just two days after Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and as popular discontent over government bailouts and corporate bonuses continued to boil.
President Obama called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
The justices in the majority brushed aside warnings about what might follow from their ruling in favor of a formal but fervent embrace of a broad interpretation of free speech rights.
“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”
Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.
Detainee Photographs
In late November, the court vacated a lower court ruling that would have required the government to release photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision was three sentences long and unsigned, and it followed the enactment of a law in October allowing the secretary of defense to block the pictures’ release. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, for further consideration in light of the new law.
The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, which makes disclosure of information in the hands of the executive branch mandatory unless an exemption applies. The Second Circuit ordered the photos released last year, and the Justice Department initially recommended against an appeal to the Supreme Court. But President Obama overruled his lawyers, saying his national security advisers had persuaded him that releasing the photos would inflame anti-American sentiment abroad and endanger American troops.
Bankruptcy Lawyers
In a decision on March 8, 2010, the court interpreted a 2005 bankruptcy law narrowly to avoid a First Amendment challenge. The law forbids some professionals from advising their clients “to incur more debt in contemplation of” a bankruptcy filing.
The first issue in the case was whether the law applied to lawyers, and the court, in an opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said it did. The second, harder question was whether the law violated the First Amendment in forbidding lawyers from giving some kinds of advice.
Justice Sotomayor wrote that the law, properly read, prohibited lawyers “only from advising a debtor to incur more debt because the debtor is filing for bankruptcy, rather than for a valid purpose.”
The ruling in the case, Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz v. United States, No. 08-1119, was unanimous, though Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas did not join in all of Justice Sotomayor’s reasoning.
Free Speech/Cruelty to Animals
In a major and muscular First Amendment ruling, the court on April 20, 2010, struck down a federal law that made it a crime to create or sell dogfight videos and other depictions of animal cruelty. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 8-to-1 decision, said the law created “a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth” and that the government’s aggressive defense of the law was “startling and dangerous.”
The case arose from the prosecution of Robert J. Stevens, an author and small-time film producer who presented himself as an authority on pit bulls. He did not participate in dogfights, but he did compile and sell videotapes showing the fights, and he received a 37-month sentence under a 1999 federal law that bans trafficking in “depictions of animal cruelty.”
Dogfighting and other forms of animal cruelty have long been illegal in all 50 states. The law applied not to the underlying activity, but to recordings of “conduct in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded or killed.” It did not matter whether the conduct was legal when and where it occurred; under the law, what mattered was whether the conduct would have been illegal where the recording was sold.
The government argued that such depictions were of such minimal social worth that they should receive no First Amendment protection at all. Chief Justice Roberts roundly rejected that assertion, saying that “the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter or its content.”
The 1999 law was enacted mainly to address what a House report called “a very specific sexual fetish'' -- videos featuring "women inflicting the torture with their bare feet or while wearing high-heeled shoes.”
Chief Justice Roberts said the law applied too broadly. Since all hunting is illegal in the District of Columbia, for instance, he said, the law makes the sale of magazines or videos showing hunting a crime in the district. “The demand for hunting depictions exceeds the estimated demand for crush videos or animal fighting depictions by several orders or magnitude,” he wrote.
Financial Pay Arrangements
The court ruled in March that courts have a role, though a limited one, in policing the compensation of mutual fund investment advisers.
The ruling set aside a decision from the federal appeals court in Chicago that said the marketplace could for the most part be trusted to set such pay. But the standard adopted in the decision was distinctly fuzzy and might provide little concrete guidance to the lower courts.
The case was brought by investors in Oakmark mutual funds who said the funds had overpaid their investment adviser, Harris Associates. Like most mutual funds, Oakmark was formed by its investment adviser, which selected the fund’s board. That board then negotiated the adviser’s fees.
Apparently wary of the potential conflicts of interest such arrangements can entail, Congress in 1970 imposed fiduciary duty on advisers concerning their compensation. The Oakmark investors said Harris Associates had violated its fiduciary duty by charging them twice as much as the company charged independent institutional investors like pension funds.
First Amendment
A cross in the Mojave National Preserve in California that was erected more than 70 years ago as a war memorial is at the center of Salazar v. Buono. After a federal judge ruled that the cross violated the Constitution's ban on government establishment of religion, Congress transferred the acre of land on which it sits to private ownership. The justices considered whether the plaintiff, Frank Buono, had standing to object and whether the transfer arrangement fixed the constitutional problem.
The Supreme Court ruled on April 28 that Congress and the Interior Department acted properly when they used a land transfer to solve the dispute.
The 5-to-4 decision provided an unusually vivid glimpse into how deeply divided the court is on the role religious symbols may play in public life and, in particular, the meanings conveyed by crosses in memorials for fallen soldiers.
“A Latin cross is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in a plurality opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies would be compounded if the fallen are forgotten.”
Justice John Paul Stevens rejected that view. “The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice,” he wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. “It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.”
The ruling overturned a trial court’s order rejecting a Congressional solution to an earlier ruling that the cross conveyed the constitutionally impermissible message of government endorsement of religion in violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. But the Supreme Court did not rule on the solution itself and instead returned the case to the lower courts for reconsideration.
DECISIONS
Detainees
The court on March 1 said it would not decide a case involving Chinese Muslims detained for eight years at Guantánamo Bay that had been set for argument.
The prisoners, captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, have been determined to pose no threat to the United States, but the government has opposed their request to be released in the United States.
In October 2009, the court agreed to decide whether a federal judge in Washington had the power to order the men released from the prison at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, into the United States. But other countries have since said that they would accept the detainees, and the justices said that factual developments since it had agreed to hear the case might “affect the legal issues presented.”
In an unsigned three-paragraph decision, the court erased the appeals court decision in the case and sent it back to the lower courts for re-examination.
Crime Labs
In January, the court disposed of what could have been a major case on testimony from crime lab analysts with an unsigned one-sentence opinion sending the case back to the lower courts.
The court’s decision to send the crime lab case, Briscoe v. Virginia, No. 07-11191, back to the lower courts meant that it would not cut back on or clarify a major ruling from June 2009 anytime soon. That ruling barred prosecutors from presenting crime lab reports without testimony from the analysts who prepared them.
The narrower issue directly presented by the Briscoe case was whether prosecutors wishing to present lab reports were permitted to do something short of calling analysts as witnesses during the prosecution’s case. As the justices explored that question at the argument of the case two weeks ago, it became clear that they had chosen a poor vehicle through which to give general guidance to the lower courts.
PENDING CASES
First Amendment
In a First Amendment case, the Supreme Court on March 8 agreed to decide whether the father of a Marine killed in Iraq may sue protesters who picketed his son’s funeral with signs that read “God Hates You” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.”
A federal appeals court dismissed the suit on First Amendment grounds and threw out a $5 million award against the protesters, who are members of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., and maintain that God hates homosexuality and that the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is God’s way of punishing the United States for its tolerance of it.
The fallen Marine was Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder, and his funeral was held in Westminster, Md., in 2006. The case was brought by his father, Albert Snyder. His central claim is that the protesters intentionally inflicted emotional distress on him.
Background Checks
The court also agreed to decide whether a 2004 Bush administration antiterrorism initiative violated the privacy rights of scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a research facility operated by the California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA.
The initiative extended the background checks required for many government jobs to contract employees like those at the laboratory. The employees sued, saying that such government investigations are needlessly intrusive and violate privacy rights.