She will be missed by women and men of good will – around this whole world.
Tag: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Receiving $1Million Award
❝ Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the winner of this year’s $1 million Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture. The award announced Wednesday by the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute honors Ginsburg, who started the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project in the 1970s, for her pioneering legal work for gender equality and her support for the rule of law. The institute says Ginsburg will direct the money to charity…
Of course, she will. Of course, she would.
What motivates Texas’ voter ID law? Supreme Court Justice says — racism
As one might expect, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had no difficulty putting her finger on the point of Texas’ voter ID law: it’s openly racist.
Ginsburg’s colleagues voted 6-3 to allow the Texas law to remain in effect for the upcoming election. But as she observed in a scathing dissent issued Saturday, the measure may prevent more than 600,000 registered voters, or 4.5% of the total, from voting in person for lack of accepted identification. “A sharply disproportionate percentage of those voters are African-American or Hispanic,” she wrote.
The law’s intent is “purposely discriminatory,” Ginsburg concluded. Citing the U.S. District Court ruling that declared the Texas law unconstitutional, she observed that since 2000, Texas has become a majority-minority state. That gave its Legislature and governor “an evident motive to ‘gain partisan advantage by suppressing'” the votes of blacks and Latinos.
Is there any better testament to the bankruptcy of Republican political ideas than the party’s consistent effort to win elections by limiting the vote?…
Like all the Republican-governed states using this ploy to stop folks from voting, Texas turned up two cases that it to court. Time and again these states waste taxpayer dollar$ trying to prove their patent-leather lies.
Here in New Mexico, our Republican Secretary of state wasted hundreds of thousands of dollar$ trying to prove “widespread fraud” as preamble to forcing a law as criminal as the Texas variety. At the end she found a dozen people improperly registered and a couple who thought they were supposed to vote. And tried. And were turned away.
End of story. Meanwhile, crooks masquerading as constitutional experts run this crap through the Supreme Court as progress because right-wing bigots say we are a post-racial society. I would gladly start believing in some sillyass deity if these turds were struck by lightning for their lies.
Thanks, Mike
Ginsburg was right!
The great Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that important Supreme Court decisions “exercise a kind of hydraulic effect.” Even if the authors of such decisions assert that their rulings will have limited impact, these cases invariably have a profound influence. So it has been with Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which is less than six months old.
In Hobby Lobby, a narrow five-to-four majority of the Court held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 gave the proprietors of a chain of retail craft stores the right to exempt themselves from certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Specifically, the A.C.A. requires firms with more than fifty employees to provide insurance that includes birth-control coverage, or else pay a fine. There was an exemption already for religious institutions. Hobby Lobby, a closely held corporation, is a secular, for-profit business, but the Court held that because the owners of Hobby Lobby held a sincere religious belief that certain forms of birth control caused abortions, they could deny employer-paid insurance coverage for them…
Ruth Bader Ginsburg…wondered where the guidance was for the lower courts when faced with similar claims from employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills coated with gelatin (certain Muslims, Jews, and Hindus); and vaccinations (Christian Scientists, among others)…
The Supreme Court itself has suggested that the implications of Hobby Lobby were broader than Alito originally let on. Just days after the decision, the Court’s majority allowed Wheaton College, which is religiously oriented, to refuse to fill out a form asking for an exemption from the birth-control mandate—while retaining the exemption. There is another case, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, which is also pending, where a religious order asserts that the filling out of a form (which, if granted, would exempt them from the law’s requirements) violates their rights.
If just filling out a form can count as a “substantial burden,” it’s hard to imagine any obligation that would not.
RTFA for all the crap arguments rising like a tide of theocracy against the shores of constitutional democracy. The holier-than-thou brigade has never disappeared in this land; but, support given by slippery opportunists like President George the Little and his conservative mates on the Supreme Court have them beating on the doors of law and justice like a bellowing clan of zombies.
I’d love to see a conscientious objector who hasn’t gone through all the drudgery required by Selective Service simply refuse to fill out his registration with the SS – and watch the about face from war-lovers who endorse Republican bench-warmers in black robes.
Thanks, Mike
Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg to officiate same-sex wedding
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first Supreme Court member to conduct a same-sex marriage ceremony Saturday when she officiates at the Washington wedding of Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser.
The gala wedding of Kaiser and economist John Roberts at the performing arts center brings together the nation’s highest court and the capital’s high society and will mark a new milepost in the recognition of same-sex unions.
Such marriages were virtually unheard of a little more than a decade ago but now are legal in the nation’s capital, 13 states and in all or part of 17 other countries. After victories at the Supreme Court earlier this summer, a wave of litigation is challenging bans on same-sex marriages in states where they remain prohibited.
During a recent interview, Ginsburg seemed excited about being the first member of the court to conduct such a ceremony and said it was only a logical next step.
“I think it will be one more statement that people who love each other and want to live together should be able to enjoy the blessings and the strife in the marriage relationship,” Ginsburg said…
Earlier this summer, Ginsburg was in the majority in a pair of major gay rights victories at the Supreme Court. The court said the federal government may not refuse to recognize legally married gay couples and reinstated a lower-court ruling that found California’s ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional…
It is not uncommon for Supreme Court justices to officiate at weddings, most often for former law clerks or close friends or relatives. Ginsburg tied the knot for her son, for instance. Justice Clarence Thomas performed a ceremony for radio host Rush Limbaugh.
Bravo. The triumph of love continues to march across these sometimes United States.
Supreme Court allows suit to force DNA testing in Texas appeal
Justice Ginsburg
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
The Supreme Court on Monday made it easier for inmates to sue for access to DNA evidence that could prove their innocence.
The legal issue in the case was tightly focused and quite preliminary: Was Hank Skinner, a death row inmate in Texas, entitled to sue a prosecutor there under a federal civil rights law for refusing to allow testing of DNA evidence? By a 6-to-3 vote, the court said yes, rejecting a line of lower-court decisions that had said the only proper procedural route for such challenges was a petition for habeas corpus.
In her opinion for the majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized the narrowness of the ruling. Allowing Mr. Skinner to sue, she said, was not the same thing as saying he should win his suit.
Justice Ginsburg added that a 2009 decision, District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne, had severely limited the kinds of claims prisoners seeking DNA evidence can make. The Osborne decision, she wrote, “left slim room for the prisoner to show that the governing state law denies him procedural due process.”
The case decided Monday, Skinner v. Switzer, No. 09-9000, arose from three killings on New Year’s Eve in 1993…Prosecutors tested some but not all of the evidence from the crime scene. Some of it pointed toward Mr. Skinner, who never denied that he was present, but some did not. His trial lawyer, wary of what additional testing might show, did not ask for it.
In the years since, prosecutors have blocked Mr. Skinner’s requests to test blood, fingernail scrapings and hair found at the scene.
In 2001, Texas enacted a law allowing post-conviction DNA testing in limited circumstances. State courts in Texas rejected Mr. Skinner’s requests under the law, saying he was at fault for not having sought testing earlier. Mr. Skinner then sued in federal court under a federal civil rights law known as Section 1983, saying the Texas law violated his right to due process.
Justice Ginsburg wrote that a Section 1983 suit was available in cases where the relief sought by the inmate would not “necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence.” Since there was no telling whether the results of the tests Mr. Skinner sought would establish his guilt, clear him or be inconclusive, she wrote, the suit was proper.
The reality of most jurisdictions is that judges and prosecutors always hate to face an appeal – especially in the era when scientific tests are becoming practical and available which might prove those they convicted – to be innocent.
Eideard 