After the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), a myriad of legislative responses to Roe held that the right of privacy encompasses a woman’s right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy.
After the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), a myriad of legislative responses to Roe held that the right of privacy encompasses a woman’s right to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy.
Airplane piracy increased in occurrence and success in the 1960s, leading to the creation of a 1968 task force that developed a hijacker detection and deterrence system.
In its 1985 decision in Aguilar v. Felton, the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a government program that provided remedial instruction to low-income children attending parochial schools—a decision that reflected the strong separationist jurisprudence adhered to by a narrow majority of the Court’s justices during that era.
In Agostini v. Felton, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed its 1985 decision in Aguilar v. Felton, 473 U.S. 402 (1985) (and portions of its companion decision in School District of Grand Rapids v. Ball, 473 U.S. 373, 1985)...
Affirmative action has emerged as a controversial issue in American political and constitutional discourse.
In 1981, Congress enacted the Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Grants Act (AFLA) in response to the severe social and economic consequences that often follow pregnancy and childbirth among unmarried adolescents.
The Fourth Amendment requires all searches and seizures to be reasonable.
In the landmark case of The New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 25 (1964), the Supreme Court developed the actual malice concept.
Lord John Acton, the great liberal academic who dominated the field of history during the latter part of the Victorian Age, was born into a family of the upper echelon of society in Italy and moved to England at the age of three.
ACT UP—the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power— came together in March 1987 out of the charismatic exhortations of author and playwright Larry Kramer.
A defendant in a multidefendant criminal trial who confesses to illegal conduct is making a direct admission regarding his acts.
The free exercise clause of the First Amendment is often interpreted as requiring the government to accommodate religion by refraining from applying to religious practitioners general laws that interfere with the edicts of particular religious faiths.
In two cases decided on the same day in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court said that state and federal prison regulations barring journalists from interviewing individual inmates did not violate the First Amendment.
Courts generally recognize two independent rights of public access to judicial records, one stemming from the common law and one from the First Amendment. Both are predicated on furthering government accountability.
In a democratic society, the informed citizen must have an affirmative right to gain access to information concerning the operations of government.
Academic freedom is a concept that encompasses notions of philosophy and contracts as well as civil liberties. In the United States the concept of academic freedom has developed primarily (although not exclusively) in the context of higher education.
Abu Ghraib prison was originally built in the 1960s by Western contractors but achieved notoriety during Saddam Hussein’s rule as a repository for up to fifteen thousand of his political enemies.
Absolutism is an approach to interpretation of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech that takes literally the text of the amendment when it declares that ‘‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.’’
Condemning ‘‘the hypocrisy of the United States and her allies’’ and denouncing President Woodrow Wilson as a hypocrite and a coward, Jacob Abrams and four associates—all five Russian-born Jews and avowed anarchists—distributed fliers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the summer of 1918 directing attention to U.S. efforts to halt the Bolshevik Revolution.
In three cases, the Supreme Court has considered the rights of anti-abortion protestors outside abortion clinics.
A defining principle of the United States is the separation between church and state.
Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, abortion was an issue to which men, and therefore lawmakers, judges, and politicians, paid little or no attention.
In Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that assessment of mandatory service charges on nonunion members in an agency shop to finance union expenditures for collective bargaining did not violate their First Amendment rights.
Abolitionists were individuals committed to eradicating chattel slavery in the United States. The first organized abolitionist group was the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS).
