There was another important 5-4 ruling yesterday in the case of Harris v. Quinn, where the US Supreme Court dealt a blow to unions by saying that public employees cannot routinely be required to join labor unions or to support them by paying dues. (You can read more on that case here and here and here.)
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It looks like Hobby Lobby has won its case. In a 5-4 decision along the usual lines (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Kennedy, all of whom are Catholics by the way), the court said that ‘closely held corporations’ (a specific type of for-profit corporation) each owned and controlled by members of a single family cannot be forced to provide contraception coverage for its employees and should be given the same accommodations as the government gave nonprofit organizations.
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Readers may recall the interesting case involving a company called Aereo that was marketing a small antenna that can be connected to your mobile device. That antenna was linked to an transmitter at Aereo that picked up programming that is being broadcast over the air by the TV networks. In other words, you can watch broadcast TV anywhere without a TV and can even record and save the programs for later viewing. TV stations sued, saying that these retransmissions were violating their copyright.
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Today is the first anniversary of the landmark ruling United States v. Windsor that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional and opened the floodgates to a large number of court cases that have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. So far 14 District Courts have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage (with Indiana joining them yesterday) and other courts have ruled favorably on related aspects of same-sex marriage, such as whether states that do not allow it must respect the marriages of those who were legally married in other states. There has not been a single defeat.
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The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that police cannot search one’s cell phone without a warrant. This is a good decision that puts at least some brake on the invasion of privacy by the government.
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I have railed against the abuse of the US government’s notorious ‘No Fly List’, where the government keeps a secret list that tells airlines not to let people fly without telling them why they have been forbidden, what they need to do to get their names removed, nor even (in the early days) that they have such a list at all. This is such an arbitrary abuse of government power and due process that it boggles the mind
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In the last year, ever since the US Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor last summer, advocates for the legalization of same-sex marriage have won one victory after another in federal and state courts. But the real test will come when the Appeals Courts around the country rule on the appeals against the lower court verdicts.
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Recall the case that I wrote about in April in which Coca-Cola was being sued by a pomegranate juice maker POM Wonderful because it was prominently advertising a drink as ‘pomegranate blueberry’ when it contained only 0.5% of those ingredients, the rest being apple and grape juice. This subterfuge enabled it to sell its product for a mere fraction of the cost of its competitor that consisted of only those juices.
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Debtor’s prisons consisting of people sent to jail because they were too poor to pay fines were common in the 18th century. Charles Dickens’s father was someone who was sent to a debtor’s prison and his shame over this is said to have been a significant influence in his crusade against the way that poor people were treated. Such prisons were outlawed in the UK in 1869.
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We have all heard (I hope!) of Rosa Parks and her refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus, triggering the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and strikes and walkouts and other forms of civil disobedience that highlighted the racial discrimination of those times and eventually led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But there were other lesser-known people who also showed courage and determination in expanding the right of everyone to be treated equally and with dignity.
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