Source: https://lawpundit.blogspot.com/2015/09/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 10:07:07+00:00

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Today, September 29, 2015, marks the 10th Anniversary of the Appointment of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Caitlin Graf, VP, Communications, The Nation Magazine, has sent out the following newsletter message, and we pass it on here in full noting that the Nation has published a special issue that deals with the performance of the United States Supreme Court over the last decade.
"Tuesday, September 29, marks the tenth anniversary of John Roberts' appointment as Chief Justice of the United States. In anticipation, The Nation is publishing "The Case Against The Roberts Court: A Decade of Justice Undone," a special issue in collaboration with the Alliance for Justice (AFJ).
Why the spotlight? The lead up to the 2016 election marks a cardinal moment for justice in America: with four Supreme Court justices in or entering their 80s during this term, the next president will have the power to define the course of the Court for future generations.
As with The Nation's 2012 special issue on "The One Percent Court," "The Case Against The Roberts Court" exposes the extreme politicization of the purportedly impartial institution -- and reveals the devastating consequences of its decisions for everyday Americans.
Bringing together ten of the foremost legal scholars, commentators, and practitioners in the US, the collection offers a chronological assessment of the most consequential and controversial conservative decisions -- one per year -- issued by the Court.
"The result," write Nan Aron and Kyle C. Barry in their introduction, "is a wide-angle portrait that thoroughly debunks the myth of Roberts as unbiased umpire. Rather than provide 'equal justice under law,' Roberts has led a narrow conservative majority that consistently favors the privileged and powerful (especially corporations) at the expense of everyone else (especially women, workers, consumers, people of color, and the accused)."
Ultimately, this unrelenting conservatism of the Roberts Court is evident across three sweeping arenas.
- George H. Kendall questions whether the death penalty is even constitutional.
- Dahlia Lithwick assesses the gross extension of "religious liberty" as an excuse to deny women's rights.
- Lily Eskelsen García evaluates rampant union-busting.
Yet with the dissenting opinion, Nation legal affairs correspondent David Cole opts for a silver lining, writing: "Given the lopsided Republican advantage in appointments over the last half-century, it's not surprising that the Court has reached many conservative results. The surprise, rather, is that the Court has also issued a significant number of liberal decisions in recent decades. . . . On this closely divided Court, outcomes are determined not by the most extreme but by the most centrist justice. Convention dictates that we call it the Roberts Court, but in truth this is the Kennedy Court. And Kennedy has voted with the liberals on issues of speech, sexuality, the death penalty, and the rights of enemy combatants, while siding with the conservatives on issues of racial discrimination, federal power, and access to courts."
Full contents of the special issue are listed and linked below; select contributors available for interview.
"The Case Against The Roberts Court: A Decade of Justice Undone"
In the decade since John Roberts was appointed chief justice, the Supreme Court has favored the powerful at the expense of everyone else.
A Dissent: The Court's results are mixed, not because of John Roberts's leadership but because of Anthony Kennedy's more balanced commitments.
PAUL BUTLER | Think Police Can't Use Illegally Obtained Evidence Against You? Think Again.
Hudson v. Michigan (2006): Thanks to the Roberts Court, there's no penalty for ignoring a key 4th Amendment protection.
WILLIAM YEOMANS | Parents Tried to Desegregate Their Schools. The Roberts Court Said No.
Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007): The conservative majority rewrote decades of equal protection law in the name of a fictional color-blind Constitution.
District of Columbia v. Heller (2008): Why did the conservative justices, who seem so devoted to "originalism," upend the well-established meaning of the 2nd Amendment?
Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009): By rewriting the rules for civil complaints, the Supreme Court denied access to poor and middle-class people -- and handed a big gift to corporate interests.
Citizens United v. FEC (2010): In order to get the ruling they wanted, the conservative justices had to ignore an extensive record on political corruption.
HERMAN SCHWARTZ | The Death of the Class-Action Lawsuit?
Wal-Mart v. Dukes and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2011): Class actions were the weapon of the people-until the Roberts Court made it nearly impossible to file one.
Knox v. SEIU (2012): For decades the Supreme Court supported rules to protect collective bargaining. That era is over.
Shelby County v. Holder (2013): The Supreme Court said that times have changed. So why were 180 restrictive voting laws passed after it gutted the Voting Rights Act?
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014): The ruling has enabled corporations and Christian zealots to claim "religious liberty" as an excuse to deny women's rights and skirt the law.
GEORGE H. KENDALL | Is the Death Penalty Unconstitutional?
Glossip v. Gross (2015): Following a controversial ruling over lethal injections, Justice Breyer suggested that capital punishment may violate the 8th Amendment. It's time to bring that case to court.
Founded in 1865 and currently celebrating its 150th anniversary, The Nation is America's oldest weekly magazine, serving as a critical, independent voice in American journalism and a platform for investigative reporting and spirited debate on issues of import to the progressive community. Through changing times and fashions, The Nation and TheNation.com offer consistently informed and inspired reporting and analysis of breaking news, politics, social issues and the arts-never faltering in our editorial commitment to what Nation Publisher Emeritus Victor Navasky has called "a dissenting, independent, trouble-making, idea-launching journal of critical opinion."
Alliance for Justice believes that all Americans have the right to secure justice in the courts and to have their voices heard when government makes decisions that affect their lives. We are a national association of over 100 organizations, representing a broad array of groups committed to progressive values and the creation of an equitable, just, and free society.
Passive House: The Ecological Future of Building Construction?
Politics and Population Density: Are the Number of People Per Square Mile the Most Determinative Factor in Political Election Voting?
The upcoming 2016 U.S. Presidential Election is currently all about personalities and issues, but are those the most determinative items for voting behavior?
What if it turned out that population densities determine the winner of the Presidential election at least as much as any other factor?
The traditional manner of pigeonholing political parties, candidates and platforms into a single point of view about any political issue is not well suited to the actual realities of our world, which, it would seem, require geographic differentiation. The division of the political landscape of the United States into red and blue States is a good example.
Take Nebraska, a red State, where the present writer grew up, for example, which always votes massively for Republican Party candidates in Presidential elections (sometimes giving them the greatest percentage majorities of any U.S. State) and yet at the same time has elected a number of Governors of the State from the Democratic Party. How is that to be explained?
We have several good friends from Nebraska with whom we correspond now and then about political matters and they are divided equally as regards Republican Party and Democratic Party allegiance and we share a lot of their views - on BOTH sides of the political fence! How is that possible?
We think the answers to both questions above are rooted in a politically neutral appreciation of the impact of geographic differentiation, e.g. on the example of population densities.
Except for its two largest metropolitan areas, Omaha and Lincoln, the State of Nebraska is sparsely populated and subsists primarily as farm or ranch country, with even Omaha, e.g. having the largest stockyards in the nation (at least they were so in my day), famous to most readers indirectly via "Omaha Steaks".
Who is not familiar with the "agrarian-named" Cornhuskers of Lincoln? The cities in Nebraska too have a strong connection to farming and ranching, professions that are predominantly rural, i.e. "conservative" politically.
As I argue to my friends in Nebraska, it is entirely consistent to support conservative views INSIDE predominantly rural Nebraska because they work demonstrably well there, but, at the same time to argue that those views do not necessarily work demonstrably well in large urban areas, which have many other kinds of problems, and where other solutions may be required.
In other words, one can, without great contradiction, be a conservative in and for Nebraska, but perhaps at the same time support liberal views in and for a heavily urbanized State such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, or even strongly agrarian or ranch-oriented but heavily populated Status such as California or Texas.
To demonstrate the importance of geographic differentiation, let us take as an example a "relatively non-partisan" if also sometimes very political issue, the building of roads and highways, which is a good example if only because the lady Senator from Nebraska comes from a family with expertise in this area.
How many roads and highways do we need where and in what quality?
In Germany, our domicile in a grape-growing region, even many single-track vineyard roads are paved (against mud and dust) as are virtually all roads in this heavily populated country of ca. 81 million people on ca. 138000 square miles of land -- a population density of ca. 585 persons per square mile.
By contrast, the U.S.A. has ca. 322 million people on ca. 3.8 million square miles of land -- a population density of ca. 85 persons per square mile.
Germany is thus 7 times more populous per square mile than the U.S.A., a demographic fact which has enormous consequences on all kinds of practical political issues including roads and highways.
Nebraska has 77+ thousand square miles of surface, i.e. more than half the size of Germany, but with only ca. 1.9 million people, for a population density of only 24 persons per square mile, so that Nebraska is ca. 24 times less populous per square mile than Germany.
In terms of road building, the U.S.A. has ca. 10 times the length of roads that Germany has but for only ca. 4 times the number of people -- on ca. 28 times more land. Think of the cost of building roads.
It is thus no wonder that many country roads in the USA are gravel and not paved. Rural areas can live with that. Urban areas can not. It is neither a partisan nor a political issue but one of simple practicality and costs, as determined by population density and the amount of traffic.
A similar analysis will apply to many political issues.
and has the specifications listed below. The .pdf mixed text and image files have been converted as graphic images in order to have Kindle MOBI file versions that make it possible to view these volumes with Kindle, Android and iOS.
Was Mound Key, Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve, Florida an Ancient Map of North America?

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