As government has grown in the United States, conflicts between religious observers and the law have increased proportionately. Modern dilemmas are easy to find. Members of the Native American church seek to use peyote despite laws prohibiting its possession.

The Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment regulates government actors and provides, in part, the ‘‘right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.’’

Although the first two clauses of the First Amendment concern the establishment and free exercise of ‘‘religion,’’ the amendment long has been understood to protect the liberty and equality of nonbelievers.

The United States provides several forms of relief to refugees, or individuals fleeing persecution in their home country. The legal framework governing refugees derives principally from international law and has been implemented in statutes and regulations.

It was not until the last decade of the twentieth century that the U.S. Supreme Court decided three cases in which the Court began what remains a tentative exploration of whether (if at all) the U.S. Constitution guarantees a choice concerning the time and manner of one’s death.

John Ashcroft served as attorney general during the first term of the administration of George W. Bush, and in his last year in office analysts were terming him the worst attorney general in the nation’s history.

Congress passed the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that, among other things, dealt with ‘‘virtual’’ pornographic images of minors.

An arrest constitutes a seizure and must therefore satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that all searches and seizures be reasonable.

Law enforcement officials in America and in England in the period preceding the American Revolution did not have broad inherent authority to search and seize; such actions required authorization, and the warrant system was the primary means to confer that authority.

The fact of an arrest and the definition of an arrest are of fundamental importance.

Depending on whether the crime charged is brought federally or within a state jurisdiction, an individual accused of a crime could be faced with a few different pretrial proceedings.

In Youngblood, a divided Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause does not require the government to preserve evidence that could conclusively prove the defendant innocent.

In Hicks, the Supreme Court announced that probable cause is required to justify the search or seizure of items discovered in ‘‘plain view’’ during an unrelated search. Police entered an apartment after shots were fired through its floor, injuring a man in the apartment below.

Arizona v. Fulminante considered whether a state court properly found a defendant’s confession was coerced in violation of the Fifth Amendment and whether admission of a coerced confession is properly evaluated using harmless error analysis.

Aptheker is an important civil liberties case involving the right to travel. In Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U.S. 500, 84 S.Ct. 1659 (1964), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal law that the Court believed unconstitutionally interfered with the freedom of American citizens to travel abroad.

Appropriation of name or likeness, the oldest and most widely recognized branch of the invasion of privacy tort, imposes liability for unauthorized use of another’s name, likeness, or other identifying characteristics.

This case was designed to protect the Sixth Amendment right to a ‘‘speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury’’ and the right inherent in the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to have every element of a criminal offense proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Those responsible for adding the Bill of Rights to the new federal constitution intended those amendments to act as limits on the national government only, a point illustrated as succinctly as possible by the opening words of the First Amendment: ‘‘Congress [emphasis added] shall make no law . . . .’’

In Apodaca v. Oregon, the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the question of whether the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial required a unanimous verdict.

In the United States antipolygamy laws were exclusively aimed at the polygamous practices of the nineteenth- century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) which began to publicly practice and advocate polygamy in 1852.

Discrimination occurs when the civil rights of an individual are denied or interfered with because of the individual’s membership in a particular group or class.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in 1913 by Sigmund Livingston, a Chicago lawyer, to combat the anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews that was prevalent at the time.

From the ‘‘Salem witch trials’’ to the criminal prosecutions that constitute part of the government’s ‘‘war on terror,’’ American criminal law has been used to stamp out threats, perceived or actual, to federal and state governments.

The concept of a ‘‘buffer zone’’ was first raised in the 1990s. It was based on two things: increasingly violent and intrusive protests by anti-abortion forces and clinic actions to try to keep protesters a certain distance away from the clinics.