Category Archives: supreme court
DNA Patent
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that natural human DNA cannot be patented. On the other hand, the court says you can patent unnatural manmade genetic material. When the patent runs out will there be generic genetic material?
Police State
Poor Eric Holder. He might have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply looking up reporter James Rosen’s phone records among the records of all Verizon customers collected by the NSA, as reported in The Guardian.
That action occurred under a FISA court order and was an expansion of phone surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists which began under the Bush administration Patriot Act.
Catherine Herridge at Fox News reports that, in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that NSA intentionally collects data on millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may take DNA samples from anyone they arrest. Here’s a piece by Jeffery (the other) Rosen about Scalia’s dissent in favor of the fourth amendment.
Update: It’s not just your phone calls anymore. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the government mines your internet data too.
Guns and Abortion
The Roe v Wade decision of 1973 established a woman’s constitutional right not to bear children. The constitutional right to bear arms was ratified by 3/4 of the states in 1791.
As the president would say, the public’s views have “evolved” on social issues. People are becoming more tolerant of homosexuality in general and same sex marriage in particular. Ten states plus the District of Columbia now recognize same sex marriage.
Abortion is trickier. According to a Quinnipiac poll 63% still support the Roe v Wade decision. Yet in a USA Today Poll only 28% believe it should always be legal, 52% say sometimes legal, and 18% never legal. Eighty percent feel it should never be legal in the last trimester of pregnancy – Dr. Gossnell’s sweet spot.
Unfortunately, that last trimester is also the sweet spot for politicians like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. While scolding the gun lobby’s “willfull lies”, the president blindly supports an abortion lobby that leads to barbaric practices like Dr. Gossnell’s.
(Journalists have been shamed into providing more coverage of the case.)
Same Sex Supreme Court
Justice Kennedy isn’t homophobic, he’s Roe v Wade-phobic. He think’s “a democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say”.
Which is what happened in the Roe v Wade decision. Attitudes toward abortion were already changing and Justice Ginsburg says the court went “too far and too fast“ in removing the issue from the political process. Anger and frustration rages over abortion today with many attitudes shifting back the other way.
But nobody likes an abortion. Everybody loves a wedding.
Borked
Robert Bork died late this year. He was a distinguished scholar. One of his many distinctions included having a last name as a verb form – “to bork”. The good judge was borked by Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy during senate hearings on his nomination to the supreme court.
The late senator from Chappaquiddick claimed, “Robert Bork’s America” was a place where “women would be forced into back alley abortions and blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.” A more circumspect Biden would wait 25 years before claiming they would be seated in chains.
