Indicating they will be monitoring the growing use of such technology, five justices said they could see constitutional and privacy problems with police using many kinds of electronic surveillance for long-term tracking of citizens’ movements without warrants.

While the justices differed on legal rationales, their unanimous outcome was an unusual setback for government and police agencies grown accustomed to being given leeway in investigations in post-Sept. 11 America, including by the Supreme Court. The views of at least the five justices raised the possibility of new hurdles down the road for police who want to use high-tech surveillance of suspects, including various types of GPS technology.

“The Supreme Court’s decision is an important one because it sends a message that technological advances cannot outpace the American Constitution,” said Donald Tibbs, a professor at the Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University. “The people will retain certain rights even when technology changes how the police are able to conduct their investigations.”

A GPS device installed by police on Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones’ Jeep and tracked for four weeks helped link him to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before an appeals court overturned his conviction.

It’s not clear how much difficulty police agencies would have with warrant requirements in this area; historically they are rarely denied warrants they request. But the Obama administration argued that getting one could be cumbersome, perhaps impossible in the early stages of an investigation. In the Jones case, police got a warrant but did not install the GPS device until after the warrant had expired and then in a jurisdiction that wasn’t covered by the document.

Justice Antonin Scalia said the government’s installation of the device, and its use of the GPS to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constituted a search, meaning a warrant was required. “Officers encroached on a protected area,” Scalia wrote.

Relying on a centuries-old legal principle, he concluded that the police action without a warrant was a trespass and therefore an illegal search. He was joined in his opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

All nine justices agreed that the GPS monitoring on the Jeep violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, a decision the American Civil Liberties Union said was an “important victory for privacy.”

But there was a major division between Scalia, the court’s conservative leader, and Justice Samuel Alito, a former federal prosecutor and usually a Scalia ally, over how much further the court should go beyond just saying that police can’t put a GPS device on something used by a suspect without a warrant.

Alito wrote, in a concurring opinion, that the trespass was not as important as the suspect’s expectation of privacy and the duration of the surveillance.

“The use of longer-term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy,” Alito wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor in her concurring opinion specifically said she agreed with Alito on this conclusion.

No justice embraced the government’s argument that the surveillance of Jones was acceptable because he had no expectation of privacy for the Jeep’s location on public roads.

Alito added, “We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the four-week mark.”

Regarding the issue of duration, Scalia wrote that “we may have to grapple” with those issues in the future, “but there is no reason for rushing forward to resolve them here.”

Sotomayor, in her separate opinion, wrote that it may be time to rethink all police use of tracking technology, not just long-term GPS.

“GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movement that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, religious and sexual associations,” Sotomayor said. “The government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information for years to come.”

Alito also said the court and Congress should address how expectations of privacy affect whether warrants are required for remote surveillance using electronic methods that do not require the police to install equipment, such as GPS tracking of mobile telephones. Alito noted, for example, that more than 322 million cellphones have installed equipment that allows wireless carriers to track the phones’ locations.

“If long-term monitoring can be accomplished without committing a technical trespass — suppose for example, that the federal government required or persuaded auto manufacturers to include a GPS tracking device in every car — the court’s theory would provide no protection,” Alito said.

Sotomayor agreed. “It may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to their parties,” she said.

Washington lawyer Andy Pincus called the decision “a landmark ruling in applying the Fourth Amendment’s protections to advances in surveillance technology.” Pincus has argued 22 cases before the Supreme Court and filed a brief in the current case on behalf of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group with expertise in law, technology and policy.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the court’s decision was “a victory for privacy rights and for civil liberties in the digital age.” He said the ruling highlighted many new privacy threats posed by new technologies. Leahy has introduced legislation to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that specifies standards for government monitoring of cellphone conversations and Internet communications.

The lower appellate court that threw out Jones’ conviction also objected to the duration of the surveillance.

The case is U.S. v. Jones, 10-1259.

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The decision to hear arguments in the spring sets up an election-year showdown over the White House’s main domestic- policy achievement. And it allows plenty of time for a decision in late June, just over four months before Election Day.

The justices announced they will hear an extraordinary 5 1/2 hours of arguments from lawyers on the constitutionality of the individual mandate — requiring the purchase of health insurance — and three related questions. The central provision in question is the requirement that individuals buy health insurance starting in 2014 or pay a penalty.

In the modern era, the last time the court allotted anywhere near this much time for arguments was in 2003, for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.

That case consumed four hours. But this argument may spread over two days, as the justices rarely hear more than two or three hours of arguments a day.

A White House spokesman said, “We are pleased that the court has agreed to hear this case.”

“We know the Affordable Care Act is constitutional and are confident the Supreme Court will agree,” said White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer.

The justices on Monday turned away the appeal of Duane Buck, who wanted them to consider whether race played an improper role in his sentencing.

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Buck, who is black, was sentenced to death for the fatal shootings of his ex-girlfriend and a man in her apartment in July 1995. His attorneys contend Buck deserves a new sentencing hearing because of a psychologist’s testimony that black people were more likely to commit violence.

Five other Texas death row inmates received new punishment hearings because of racially charged statements made during the sentencing phase. Each convict again was sentenced to die.

The justices will examine a pair of cases from the South involving young killers who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed when they were 14.

Both cases were brought by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. The institute said that life without parole for children so young “is cruel and unusual” and violates the Constitution.

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The group says roughly six dozen people in 18 states are under life sentences and ineligible for parole for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

Kuntrell Jackson was sentenced to life in prison in Arkansas after the shooting death of a store clerk during an attempted robbery in 1999. Another boy shot the clerk, but because Jackson was present he was convicted of capital murder and aggravated robbery.

Evan Miller was convicted of capital murder during the course of arson. A neighbor, while doing drugs and drinking with Miller and a 16-year-old boy, attacked Miller. Intoxicated, Miller and his friend beat the man and set fire to his home, killing the 52-year-old man. Miller’s friend testified against him, and got life in prison with the possibility of parole.

The high court has moved toward judging juveniles less responsible than adults when considering severe sentences.

The high court ruled out the use of the death penalty for people under 18 in 2005. In May 2010, the court said that teenagers may not be locked up for life without a chance of parole if they haven’t killed anyone. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in both of those decisions.

“The identical analysis which led to the results in those cases logically compels the conclusion that consigning a 14-year-old to die in prison through a life-without-parole sentence categorically violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments,” Miller’s lawyer Bryan Stevenson said in court papers. The Supreme Court should “make that logical conclusion the law of the land.”

The court will hear arguments next year.

The cases are Miller v. Alabama, 10-9646 and Jackson v. Arkansas, 10-9647.

JACKSON, Ga. (AP) — Georgia executed Troy Davis on Wednesday night for the murder of an off-duty police officer, a crime he denied committing right to the end as supporters around the world mourned and declared that an innocent man was put to death.

Defiant to the end, he told relatives of Mark MacPhail that his 1989 slaying was not his fault. “I did not have a gun,” he insisted.

“For those about to take my life,” he told prison officials, “may God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.”

Davis was declared dead at 11:08. The lethal injection began about 15 minutes earlier, after the Supreme Court rejected an 11th-hour request for a stay.

The court did not comment on its order, which came about four hours after it received the request and more than three hours after the planned execution time.

Though Davis’ attorneys said seven of nine key witnesses against him disputed all or parts of their testimony, state and federal judges repeatedly ruled against granting him a new trial. As the court losses piled up Wednesday, his offer to take a polygraph test was rejected and the pardons board refused to give him one more hearing.

Davis’ supporters staged vigils in the U.S. and Europe, declaring “I am Troy Davis” on signs, T-shirts and the Internet. Some tried increasingly frenzied measures, urging prison workers to stay home and even posting a judge’s phone number online, hoping people will press him to put a stop to the lethal injection. President Barack Obama deflected calls for him to get involved.

“They say death row; we say hell no!” protesters shouted outside the Jackson prison where Davis was to be executed. In Washington, a crowd outside the Supreme Court yelled the same chant.

As many as 700 demonstrators gathered outside the prison as a few dozen riot police stood watch, but the crowd thinned as the night wore on and the outcome became clear. The scene turned eerily quiet as word of the high court’s decision spread, with demonstrators hugging, crying, praying, holding candles and gathering around Davis’ family.

Laura Moye of Amnesty International said the execution would be “the best argument for abolishing the death penalty.”

“The state of Georgia is about to demonstrate why government can’t be trusted with the power over life and death,” she said.

About 10 counterdemonstrators also were outside the prison, showing support for the death penalty and the family of Mark MacPhail, the man Davis was convicted of killing in 1989. MacPhail’s son and brother attended the execution.

“He had all the chances in the world,” his mother, Anneliese MacPhail, said of Davis in a telephone interview. “It has got to come to an end.”

At a Paris rally, many of the roughly 150 demonstrators carried signs emblazoned with Davis’ face. “Everyone who looks a little bit at the case knows that there is too much doubt to execute him,” Nicolas Krameyer of Amnesty International said at the protest.

Davis’ execution has been stopped three times since 2007, but on Wednesday the 42-year-old ran out of legal options.

As his last hours ticked away, an upbeat and prayerful Davis turned down an offer for a special last meal as he met with friends, family and supporters.

“Troy Davis has impacted the world,” his sister Martina Correia said at a news conference. “They say, `I am Troy Davis,’ in languages he can’t speak.”

His attorney Stephen Marsh said Davis would have spent part of Wednesday taking a polygraph test if pardons officials had taken his offer seriously.

“He doesn’t want to spend three hours away from his family on what could be the last day of his life if it won’t make any difference,” Marsh said.

Amnesty International says nearly 1 million people have signed a petition on Davis’ behalf. His supporters include former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI, a former FBI director, the NAACP, several conservative figures and many celebrities, including hip-hop star Sean “P. Diddy” Combs.

“I’m trying to bring the word to the young people: There is too much doubt,” rapper Big Boi, of the Atlanta-based group Outkast, said at a church near the prison.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave Davis an unusual opportunity to prove his innocence in a lower court last year, though the high court itself did not hear the merits of the case.

He was convicted in 1991 of killing MacPhail, who was working as a security guard at the time. MacPhail rushed to the aid of a homeless man who prosecutors said Davis was bashing with a handgun after asking him for a beer. Prosecutors said Davis had a smirk on his face as he shot the officer to death in a Burger King parking lot in Savannah.

No gun was ever found, but prosecutors say shell casings were linked to an earlier shooting for which Davis was convicted.

Witnesses placed Davis at the crime scene and identified him as the shooter, but several of them have recanted their accounts and some jurors have said they’ve changed their minds about his guilt. Others have claimed a man who was with Davis that night has told people he actually shot the officer.

“Such incredibly flawed eyewitness testimony should never be the basis for an execution,” Marsh said. “To execute someone under these circumstances would be unconscionable.”

State and federal courts, however, have repeatedly upheld Davis’ conviction. One federal judge dismissed the evidence advanced by Davis’ lawyers as “largely smoke and mirrors.”

“He has had ample time to prove his innocence,” said MacPhail’s widow, Joan MacPhail-Harris. “And he is not innocent.”

The last motion filed by Davis’ attorneys in Butts County Court challenged testimony from two witnesses and disputed testimony from the expert who linked the shell casings to the earlier shooting involving Davis. Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson and the Georgia Supreme Court rejected the appeal, and prosecutors said the filing was just a delay tactic.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which helped lead the charge to stop the execution, said it considered asking Obama to intervene, even though he cannot grant Davis clemency for a state conviction.

Press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement saying that although Obama “has worked to ensure accuracy and fairness in the criminal justice system,” it was not appropriate for him “to weigh in on specific cases like this one, which is a state prosecution.”

Dozens of protesters outside the White House called on the president to step in, and about 12 were arrested for disobeying police orders.

Davis was not the only U.S. inmate put to death Wednesday evening. In Texas, white supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was put to death for the 1998 dragging death of a black man, James Byrd Jr., one of the most notorious hate crime murders in recent U.S. history.

Davis’ best chance may have come last year, in a hearing ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the first time in 50 years that justices had considered a request to grant a new trial for a death row inmate.

The high court set a tough standard for Davis to exonerate himself, ruling that his attorneys must “clearly establish” Davis’ innocence – a higher bar to meet than prosecutors having to prove guilt. After the hearing judge ruled in prosecutors’ favor, the justices didn’t take up the case.

The execution drew widespread criticism in Europe, where politicians and activists made last-minute pleas for a stay.

Spencer Lawton, the district attorney who secured Davis’ conviction in 1991, said he was embarrassed for the judicial system – not because of the execution, but because it took so long to carry out.

“What we have had is a manufactured appearance of doubt which has taken on the quality of legitimate doubt itself. And all of it is exquisitely unfair,” said Lawton, who retired as Chatham County’s head prosecutor in 2008. “The good news is we live in a civilized society where questions like this are decided based on fact in open and transparent courts of law, and not on street corners.”

—

Associated Press reporters Russ Bynum in Savannah, Kate Brumback and Marina Hutchinson in Jackson, Eric Tucker and Erica Werner in Washington and Sohrab Monemi in Paris contributed to this report.

Thomas, who is from Pin Point, introduced residents to Crow, who the Times confirmed is the anonymous donor behind $1.3 million to the museum project set to open this fall.

According to The Huffington Post, this isn’t the first time Crow donated money to projects directly or indirectly honoring Thomas. The Times unraveled a list of gifts and donations given to Thomas, including a $15,000 bust of Abraham Lincoln from a group affiliated with Crow.

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Voting 8-1, the justices reversed a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling that threw out the evidence gathered when officers entered Hollis King’s apartment.

The court said there was no violation of King’s constitutional rights because the police acted reasonably. Only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

She said:

May police, who could pause to gain the approval of a neutral magistrate, dispense with the need to get a warrant by themselves creating exigent circumstances? I would answer no, as did the Kentucky Supreme Court. The urgency must exist, I would rule, when the police come on the scene, not subsequent to their arrival, prompted by their own conduct.

How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

Officers knocked on King’s door in Lexington and thought they heard noises that indicated whoever was inside was trying to get rid of incriminating evidence.

Justice Samuel Alito said in his opinion for the court that people have no obligation to respond to the knock or, if they do open the door, allow the police to come in. In those cases, officers who wanted to gain entry would have to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant.

But Alito said, “Occupants who choose not to stand on their constitutional rights but instead elect to attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame.”

In her dissent, Ginsburg said her colleagues were giving police an easy way to routinely avoid getting warrants in drug cases.

“Police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, never mind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant,” she said.

The case concerned exceptions to the Fourth Amendment requirement that police need a warrant to enter a home.

The issue was whether warrantless entry was justified after the officers’ knock on the door triggered a reaction inside that sounded like the destruction of evidence.

An odd set of facts led to Monday’s ruling.

Police were only at King’s apartment building because they were chasing a man who sold cocaine to a police informant. The man entered King’s building and ducked into an apartment. The officers heard a door slam in a hallway, but by the time they were able to look down it, they saw only two closed doors.

They didn’t know which one the suspect had gone through, but, smelling burnt pot, chose the apartment on the left.

In fact, the suspect had gone into the apartment on the right. Police eventually arrested him, too, but prosecutors later dropped charges against him for reasons that were not explained in court papers.

In other action Monday, the court refused to revive a lawsuit challenging a controversial post-Sept. 11 CIA program that flew terrorism suspects to secret prisons. The appeal asked the court to examine two much-disputed aspects of the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, “the extraordinary rendition” program that sent the suspects to secret prisons and the “state secrets privilege.”

The high court has refused several other appeals based on the government’s invocation of state secrets to derail lawsuits.

The case involved five terrorism suspects who were arrested shortly after 9/11 and said they were flown by a Boeing Co. subsidiary to prisons around the world where they were tortured. A divided 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco cited national security risks in dismissing the men’s case last year.

The justices also turned aside a challenge from atheist Michael Newdow to the use of the words “so help me God” in the presidential oath of office.

In a case involving the federal whistleblower law, the justices voted 5-3 in ruling that information acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request cannot be used to trigger a False Claims Act lawsuit.

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WASHINGTON — Christine Kwapnoski hasn’t done too badly in nearly 25 years in the Wal-Mart family, making more than $60,000 a year in a job she enjoys most days.

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But Kwapnoski says she faced obstacles at Wal-Mart-owned Sam’s Club stores in both Missouri and California: Men making more than women and getting promoted faster.

She never heard a supervisor tell a man, as she says one told her, to “doll up” or “blow the cobwebs off” her make-up.

But the case’s potential importance goes well beyond the Wal-Mart dispute, as evidenced by more than two dozen briefs filed by business interests on Wal-Mart’s side, and civil rights, consumer and union groups on the other.

The question is crucial to the viability of discrimination claims, which become powerful vehicles to force change when they are presented together, instead of individually. Class actions increase pressure on businesses to settle suits because of the cost of defending them and the potential for very large judgments.

Columbia University law professor John Coffee said that the high court could bring a virtual end to employment discrimination class actions filed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, depending on how it decides the Wal-Mart case.

“Litigation brought by individuals under Title VII is just too costly,” Coffee said. “It’s either class action or nothing.”

Illustrating the value of class actions, Brad Seligman, the California-based lawyer who conceived of and filed the suit 10 years ago, said the average salary for a woman at Wal-Mart was $13,000, about $1,100 less than the average for a man, when the case began. “That’s hugely significant if you’re making $13,000 a year, but not enough to hire a lawyer and bring a case.”

The company has fought the suit every step of the way, Seligman said, because it is the “biggest litigation threat Wal-Mart has ever faced.”

A trial judge and the federal appeals court in San Francisco, over a fierce dissent, said the suit could go forward.

But Wal-Mart wants the high court to stop the suit in its tracks. The company argues it includes too many women with too many different positions in its 3,400 stores across the country. Wal-Mart says its policies prohibit discrimination and that most management decisions are made at the store and regional levels, not at its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters.

Theodore J. Boutrous, Wal-Mart’s California-based lawyer, said there is no evidence that women are poorly treated at Wal-Mart. “The evidence is the contrary of that,” Boutrous said.

The company is not conceding that any woman has faced discrimination, but says that if any allegations are proven, they are isolated. “People will make errors,” said Gisel Ruiz, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for people, as the company calls its human resources unit. “People are people.”

Ruiz paints a very different picture of the opportunities offered women at Wal-Mart. She joined the company straight from college in 1992. “In less than four years, I went from an assistant manager trainee to running my own store,” she said. “I’m one of thousands of women who have had a positive experience at Wal-Mart.”

Kwapnoski, who works at the Sam’s Club in Concord, Calif., is one of two women who continue to work at Wal-Mart while playing a prominent role in the suit. The other is Betty Dukes, a greeter at the Wal-Mart in Pittsburg, Calif.

“It’s very hard for anyone to understand how difficult that is and what courage that is,” Seligman said of Kwapnoski and Dukes. “They’re Public Enemy No. 1 at Wal-Mart and they are known for their involvement in this lawsuit. Nevertheless, they get and up and go to work every day.”

Kwapnoski didn’t want to discuss any issues she faces at work as a result of the suit.

She said she has seen some changes at Wal-Mart since the suit was filed in 2001. The company now posts all its openings electronically. “It does give people a better idea of what’s out there, but they still can be very easily passed over.” she said. “But before you didn’t even know the position was open.”

The suit, citing what are now dated figures from 2001, contends that women are grossly underrepresented among managers, holding just 14 percent of store manager positions compared with more than 80 percent of lower-ranking supervisory jobs that are paid by the hour. Wal-Mart responds that women in its retail stores made up two-thirds of all employees and two-thirds of all managers in 2001.

Kwapnoski said she and a lot of women were promoted into management just after the suit was filed, although she has had only a couple of pay increases in the nine years since. She is the assistant manager in her store’s groceries and produce sections.

Now, she said, promotions are back to the way they were before, favoring men over women.

She said she’s hoping the long-running court fight will force Wal-Mart to recognize that, stories like Ruiz’s aside, women are not valued as much as men are and that her bosses will begin to “make sure that good men and good women are being promoted, not just men.”

Once she got over the fear that she might be fired, she joined what has turned into the largest job discrimination lawsuit ever.

The 46-year-old single mother of two is one of the named plaintiffs in a suit that will be argued at the Supreme Court on Tuesday. At stake is whether the suit can go forward as a class action that could involve 500,000 to 1.6 million women, according to varying estimates, and potentially could cost the world’s largest retailer billions of dollars

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Gawker reports:

McEwen explains why she wrote a book about her decades-old tryst with the “easily aroused…national treasure,” whom she “shared with other women in ménages à trois and in a voyeuristic pleasure palace,” in this interview with AFRO. But the takeaway is that Clarence banged two ladies at once.

Which is odd, considering he’s a fire-breathing Catholic, which tend to be against sex generally and group sex in particular. Why, here’s a Supreme Court dissent by his colleague brother Nino Scalia in which Thomas concurred arguing that gay sex should remain criminal because it’s just like polygamy, which is awful.

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Washington (AP)– The Supreme Court has turned down the first preliminary challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

The decision Monday to reject an appeal from a former Republican state lawmaker in California was no surprise because a federal appeals court has yet to consider the case. The high court almost never reviews cases before the issues have been aired in lower courts.

Of more significance is the sign that all the justices took part in rejecting the appeal. New Justice Elena Kagan refused to say during her confirmation hearings whether she would take part in the court’s deliberations over the health care law. Kagan was Obama’s solicitor general before joining the court.

The court has noted Kagan’s absence in more than two dozen other cases, suggesting that she voted on the health care appeal.

Kagan has stepped aside from cases in which she was involved as a Justice Department official before joining the court.

Justice Clarence Thomas also apparently voted on the case. Some critics have called on Thomas to step aside from the health care cases because his wife, Virginia Thomas, has been an outspoken opponent of the law in her role as founder of the conservative advocacy group Liberty Central.

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AP is reporting that Elena Kagan has been confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

Kagan will replace another liberal justice, recently retired John Paul Stevens, so the court’s right-leaning ideological balance won’t be altered.

Nearly all Democrats, the Senate’s two independents and a handful of Republicans were expected to support President Barack Obama’s nomination of his 50-year-old solicitor general, a former dean of Harvard Law School.

She is the first Supreme Court nominee in nearly 40 years with no experience as a judge, and her swearing-in will mark the first time in history that three women will serve on the nine-member court together.

Her lack of judicial experience was the stated reason for one fence-sitting Republican, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, to announce his opposition to her confirmation Thursday, just hours before the vote.

Though calling her “brilliant,” Brown — who had been seen as a potential GOP supporter — said she was missing the necessary background to serve as a justice.

“The best umpires, to use the popular analogy, must not only call balls and strikes, but also have spent enough time on the playing field to know the strike zone,” Brown said.

Democrats hailed Kagan as a a highly qualified legal scholar who could help bring consensus to the polarized court and act as a counterweight to the conservative majority that’s dominated in recent years.

With her confirmation, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said near the end of a three-day debate, “average Americans will be a step closer to once again having their voices heard in the highest court in the land.”

Most Republicans portrayed Kagan as a politically motivated nominee who would allow her liberal views to interfere with her rulings, and use her post to push the Democratic agenda from the bench.

Kagan “is truly a person of the political left — now they call themselves progressives — one who has a history of working to advance the values of the left wing of the Democratic Party, and whose philosophy of judging allows a judge to utilize the power of their office to advance their vision for what America should be,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

Five Republicans — Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, retiring Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, and Indiana’s Richard Lugar — have broken with their party to back Kagan. They’ve argued that partisanship should play no role in debates over the Supreme Court and have called Obama’s nominee qualified.

Still, it was clear that unlike in past decades — when high court nominees enjoyed the support of large majorities on both sides — party politics was driving the debate and vote on Kagan, much as it did last year when the Senate considered Obama’s first pick, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and former President George W. Bush’s two nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

GOP senators have criticized Kagan for her decision as dean to bar military recruiters from the Harvard Law School career services office because of the prohibition against openly gay soldiers. Republicans spent the last hours of debate accusing her of being hostile to gun rights, and they have also spent considerable time criticizing her stance in favor of abortion rights.

Kagan revealed little about what kind of justice she would be in weeks of private one-on-one meetings with senators and several days of testimony before the Judiciary panel, despite having famously penned a law review article blasting Supreme Court nominees for obfuscating before the Senate. She dodged questions about her personal beliefs on a host of hot-button issues and declined repeatedly to “grade” Supreme Court rulings.

But her public appearances and documents unearthed from her time serving as a Clinton administration lawyer and domestic policy aide painted a portrait of the kind of personality she’ll bring to the bench. She came across as a sharp intellect who enjoys the thrust and parry of legal debate, someone who’s willing to throw elbows to make her opinions heard but nonetheless eager to facilitate consensus.

Kagan will be no stranger to the eight justices she is to join on the Supreme Court, having served as the government’s top lawyer arguing cases before them in a post often referred to as the “10th justice.” She’s already friendly with a number of them, not least Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice who is her ideological opposite.

Kagan’s nomination to a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court has drawn relatively little notice this summer, with the public and elected officials preoccupied by bad economic news and the Gulf oil spill, and many lawmakers nervously eyeing the November midterm congressional elections.

But senators have used the debate to press dueling visions of the Supreme Court. Democrats say Kagan would be a mainstream, moderate counterweight to a conservative majority they say has defied Congress and ignored the Constitution in its rulings on issues such as workplace rights and campaign finance.

Republicans argue that Obama’s choice of Kagan reflects Democratic attempts to pack courts with liberals who will mold the law to their agendas.

When sworn in, Kagan will join two other women on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sotomayor, who was Obama’s first nominee. Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman appointed to the court, by President Ronald Reagan. She served from September 1981 to January 2006.

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WASHINGTON — Pushing toward an election-year Supreme Court confirmation vote, a polarized U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday approved Elena Kagan to be the third current female justice.

Just one Republican joined Democrats to approve Kagan’s nomination and send it to the full Senate, where she is expected to win confirmation within weeks.

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If confirmed, Kagan would be the fourth woman to serve on the court and her swearing-in would mark the first time that three women have served together on the nine-member Supreme Court. Justices often serve for life so their influence can extend well beyond the president who nominates them.

The debate over her nomination has unfolded against a highly partisan backdrop, at a time when Republicans are focused on making sharp distinctions between themselves and Obama, who approval ratings are sagging little more than 100 days out from November elections.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, broke with his party to cast the sole Republican “yes” vote on President Barack Obama’s nominee to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. The vote was 13-6.

“What’s in Elena Kagan’s heart is that of a good person who adopts a philosophy I disagree with,” Graham said. “She will serve this nation honorably, and it would not have been someone I would have chosen, but the person who did choose, President Obama, I think chose wisely.”

A few more Republicans are expected likely to back Kagan in the full Senate, where Democrats have more than enough votes to confirm her.

But most Republcian senators are against her, arguing that she would put her political views ahead of the law. They point to what they call her liberal agenda and on such issues as abortion and gun rights, and have chastised her for the decision as dean of Harvard Law School to bar military recruiters from the campus career services office because of the policy against openly gay soldiers.

“Ms. Kagan’s record shows that she supports an activist judicial philosophy, and that her personal and political views drive her legal views,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican.

Democrats praised Kagan, the 50-year-old who has served as the Obama administration’s solicitor general, calling her a highly qualified glass ceiling-shattering nominee who could bring consensus to an ideologically divided court.

“It becomes more and more apparent that we need a return to the center and a justice who will urge moderation and who will push for consensus. Elena Kagan’s record gives me confidence that she could be just such a voice,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat.

Republicans have been quicker to announce their opposition to Kagan than they were last year to Obama’s first high court nominee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Graham is the only Republican so far to say he’ll vote “yes.”

Democrats attributed the difference to political considerations by the Republicans.

“Sadly, it appears election-year politics may deprive her of the vote total that her nomination deserves,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, a leading Democrat.

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Senate Panel To Vote On Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee

Senate GOP Leader Opposes Kagan

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s choice to become the third woman on the U.S Supreme Court faces her first vote on the nomination before a Senate panel dominated by Democrats who are all but certain to support her. The only real question is whether she will get any Republican votes.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee met Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Sessions, the panel’s top Republican member, said he would oppose Elena Kagan, saying she has placed her politics above the law, lacks experience and has activist judicial heroes.

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The Alabaman’s announcement was no surprise, and most Republicans are expected to join him in voting against the nomination to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

Still, a handful of Republican senators might back her, and Democrats have more than enough votes to confirm her on the panel and when the nomination goes to the Senate floor.

Kagan, a 50-year-old New York native, has served as Obama’s top Supreme Court lawyer since last year. Stevens retired in June after more than 34 years on the court. Supreme Court justices often serve for life so their influence can extend well beyond the term of the president who nominates them.

So far, no Democrat has announced opposition to Kagan and no Republican has announced support. Sen. Lindsey Graham is considered the most likely Republican on the Judiciary panel to vote for Kagan’s confirmation.

Sessions offered extensive criticism of Kagan on Monday that left little doubt he would oppose her.

“I know that our nominee was articulate and had good humor and many thought she did very well with her testimony. I was not so impressed,” Sessions said on the Senate floor.

Democrats hope to confirm Kagan before the Senate’s August recess, well in time for the court term that begins in October.

Also Monday, Kagan responded to Republican questions that she would weigh stepping aside from hearing high court challenges to the new U.S. health care law on a case-by-case basis.

She was replying to a list of questions from committee Republicans about her involvement as the government’s top lawyer in defending the health law.

Kagan, Obama’s second Supreme Court nominee, was solicitor general while the health law was being passed and as states sued the federal government in March to challenge its constitutionality.

She told Republicans in written responses to 13 questions that she had no involvement in developing the government’s response to the lawsuit and never was asked her views or offered them.

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Kagan Defends Her View Of Thurgood Marshall

OPINION: Supreme Court Hearings Remind Us Of What’s At Stake

I don’t know about you, but after watching the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, I was given the distinct impression that Thurgood Marshall was being subjected to a criminal trial, post-mortem, by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The late great Supreme Court justice—and the first African-American to sit on the high court—was mentioned no fewer than 35 times the first day.  Meanwhile, President Obama was mentioned only 14 times.

Elena Kagan has the nerve to actually admire such a man as Marshall, a civil rights giant who served as lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and served as a jurist of high distinction.  She even served as a law clerk to the man.  How dare she!  Didn’t the White House people properly vet this candidate, so as to discover such disturbing, and potentially deal-breaking, information in her past?

Each time a Supreme Court nominee comes before the Senate, we should expect the same thing: one group of lawmakers will ask thoughtful, probing questions in an attempt to determine the candidate’s suitability for the nation’s top judicial body.  But the other group, generally a contingent of dour white-male, pro-corporate, segregationist holdovers, are charged with the task of disrespecting any nominee that does not subscribe to their narrow and flawed worldview.  And it is this second group—which never passes up the opportunity to portray themselves as the twenty-first century reincarnation of Senators Strom Thurmond, Theodore Bilbo and James Eastland— that tells you all you need to know about the nature and purpose of these hearings.

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RELATED: OPINION: Why Elena Kagan Is The Perfect Choice For We The People

And these Republicans spent valuable time sullying the name of a man who accomplished more for this country than they could ever dream in a thousand lifetimes, and whose shoes they are unworthy to fill collectively, much less shine.

Harsh words, perhaps, but the unsolicited commentary those senators provided that day was harsh, and was said in the presence of Justice Marshall’s son.  The common theme was that liberal activist judges are evil, whatever “activist” means, with particular attention paid to Marshall’s view that “you do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”  Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) condemned Kagan for praising Marshall for believing that “it was the role of the courts in interpreting the Constitution to protect the people who went unprotected by every other organ of government.”  Kyl also said that Marshall’s judicial philosophy “is not what I would consider to be mainstream,” and slammed Marshall for “his unshakable determination to protect the underdog.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said of Kagan’s purported “liberal” political leanings, “And if at the end of the day, you think more like Justice Marshall than Justice Rehnquist, so be it.”  Well, one would hope that Kagan does not think like the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, who once defended the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, and began his legal career working for Operation Eagle Eye, a Republican project to intimidate, harass and exclude black and Latino voters.  He also fought the passage of a Phoenix, Arizona ordinance allowing blacks to enter stores and restaurants.

In his opening statement, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) reminded us that Elena Kagan “clerked for Judge [Abner] Mikva and Justice Marshall, each a well-known liberal activist judge.”  Yes, she clerked for a Jew and a black, and we know what happens when you get those Jewish and black civil rights-loving activist types together.  Surely this thinly-veiled racist point was not missed by the Tea Party base for which Sessions’ troubling message was intended, provided their mental capacity allowed them to catch it.

And Sessions is not one to be in judgment of anyone, yet he remains on the Senate Judiciary committee.  This is the man who was rejected by the Senate for the federal bench because he opposed the Voting Rights Act.  As a U.S. attorney in Alabama, he called a black assistant U.S. Attorney “boy” and warned him to “be careful what you say to white folks.”  He said the NAACP and the ACLU were “un-American and Communist inspired” groups that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”  As a federal prosecutor, Sessions engaged in a voter-fraud witch-hunt against three Black civil rights workers, including a former aide to Dr. King.  Moreover, during a 1981 KKK murder investigation, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.”

RELATED: Kagan Supreme Court Hearings Begin

Race was a fixture of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings, and apparently race is a big part of the Kagan hearings, even though Kagan is not a person of color.  That’s because the ultra-Right Republicans can’t let it go.  Race-baiting is their crack, if you will, and they refuse to get treatment for their affliction.  The race card won them many an election.  And though their base of good ol’ boys is dwindling, they refuse to divest themselves of a strategy that is doomed to failure in light of changing demographics.

The Kagan hearings, or any Supreme Court hearings for that matter, are part of the war to win over the hearts and minds of America, to determine what kind of country we want this to become.  Conservatives will decry the rise of the liberal activist judges who legislate from the bench.  But activism is in the eye of the beholder.  I cannot think of any greater examples of activism than the gems promulgated by the current court, such as the Citizens United decision, which gives corporations free rein to influence the political process.  And another great example is the court’s new interpretation of Second Amendment, in which the language regarding “a well regulated militia” is misconstrued as a fundamental right of personal gun ownership under federal and state and local law.  This, in a nation with 30,000 gun murders a year.

In the end, the real question is whether we want the Dred Scott court and the Plessy court, or the court that gave us the Brown decision.  It’s for the people with power or its power for the people.  And that’s what these hearings are all about.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor David A. Love, JD is a writer based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Huffington Post, theGrio, the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service, among others. He contributed to the book,States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK spokesperson. His blog is davidalove.com.

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan drew opposition Friday from Republican leader Mitch McConnell and two other GOP senators, raising the prospect of a confirmation largely along party lines.

“The American people expect a justice who will impartially apply the law, not one who will be a rubberstamp for the Obama administration or any other administration,” McConnell said in a written statement one day after Kagan, 50, wrapped up three days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary 0Committee.

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Democrats hold a 59-41 majority in the Senate, and Kagan’s confirmation is widely viewed as a certainty, barring an unexpected decision by Republicans to try and prevent a final vote. The Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on the appointment on July 13.

Kagan served as an aide in Bill Clinton’s White House and is currently solicitor general in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. She testified this week she would be able to put her political views aside if confirmed to the high court, and make rulings based on the Constitution.

In a written statement, McConnell quoted Kagan as telling the Senate Judiciary Committee this week it is “difficult to take off the advocate’s hat and put on the judge’s hat.”

The statement added, “That difficulty is particularly acute for someone like Ms. Kagan, who has spent so much of her adult life practicing the art of political advocacy rather than practicing law.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a senior Republican and member of the committee that conducted confirmation hearings, also announced his opposition, as did Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who holds a leadership position.

Hatch voted last year to confirm Kagan as solicitor general, a post in which she has appeared before the Supreme Court representing the administration.

But he said a Supreme Court nominee needs “both legal experience and, more importantly, the appropriate judicial philosophy.” And he said that “General Kagan regrettably does not meet this standard.”

Murkowski said Kagan also did not give Americans any idea how she will approach “difficult cases” as a justice.

In the past five years, confirmation proceedings for Supreme Court nominees have shown a decided partisan tinge.

Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush, was confirmed 78-22 in 2005, and Democrats cast all the votes in opposition. The following year, Justice Samuel Alito was approved 58-42, with all but four Democrats opposed.

Obama’s first pick for the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, was approved last year on a vote of 68-31. All of the votes in opposition were cast by Republicans.

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What affect will the recent Supreme Court decision have on gun crime in the Black community? While it certainly won’t help stop gun crime, it won’t necessarily have the large negative impact that one might think. The problem with gun violence is not legally owned guns but illegally owned guns. American gun laws make it very easy for people to buy guns legally and then sell them illegally to criminals in the inner-city and abroad, where they facilitate gang violence.

The right to own guns was determined by our founding fathers after a time of revolution and war. Times have changed greatly since then. We don’t have to worry about the English invading or attacks from Indians. While we must credit the founding fathers for being progressive enough to put freedom of speech, press and religion into the constitution, we must remember that they were not wise or progressive enough to extend those writes to African-Americans, women, or people who did not own property.

When our founding fathers decided to give everyone the right to bare arms, there were two types of guns, rifles and muskets. Today guns are a lot more lethal and easy to come by then in the 18th century.

Still guns are an important part of American culture. Making guns illegal would be impossible given the lobbying power of the NRA and American gun culture.

While our founding fathers could not foresee the automobile, everyone assumes that Americans have the right to drive cars. Still in order to drive a car you need a license and in order to own a car it must be registered and you need to have a license plate.If guns could be licensed and tracked like cars, it would be a lot harder for people to sell them illegally.

The problem with guns in the US isn’t the gun nuts and that NRA members are killing people, it is inner city gang-members who are buying the guns illegally from corrupt gun stores and people who take advantage of lax gun laws in these states.

Princeton University estimated in 2002 that gun violence cost America $100 billion dollars a year, $15 billion of which was attributable to gun violence against children. But as far back as 1992, annual treatment of gunshot wounds was costing US taxpayers as much as $126 billion.

Comedian, Chris Rock once proposed that we make bullets more expensive in order to stop murders. If bullets and ammunition were regulated and given serial numbers, police could easily trace the bullets to the person who bought them.

Gun companies profit off guns, if they are used by law-abiding citizens, gang members, or third world militias. There has to be a way to work out the interests of American gun enthusiasts who aren’t violent criminals and the many people in the inner city who have to deal with the heavily armed criminals.

We also need to realize that our society cannot keep living in isolation from the rest of the world when globalization continues to unify progressive ideals like sensible gun control.

The World Health Organization estimated in 2000 that 70 per cent of American youth homicide involved guns. Compare that to the 30 per cent of similar deaths in the UK, Germany, France and Canada, and the 50 per cent in Mexico, and the message is clear: The United States needs to change its approach.

We have the right to free speech but you can’t yell fire in a crowded room or tell someone to kill another person. We have freedom of the press, but not freedom to libel someone. We have freedom of religion but not freedom to sacrifice animals. How far does the right to bare arms go? Can someone buy a nuclear bomb? Rocket Launchers? WMD’s?

Jamaica has much stricter gun laws than the US, but has more murders per capita. Most of the gun deaths are caused by guns, sold illegally from the U.S.. If the U.S. wants to stop gun violence without infringing on the 2nd amendment, they must do something about illegal guns.
Illegal guns are clearly more deadly than drugs, yet there is no war on illegal guns. If we are going to keep the 2nd Amendment, we must stop the flow of illegal guns. People should not have to have their neighborhoods destroyed by guns because a few people want them for fun and protection.

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Who’s To Blame For The Violence In Jamaica?

Clarence Thomas gave his opinion on gun rights before the Supreme Court’s decision to extend gun rights and stop Chicago’s hand gun ban. He claims that Black people have had their gun rights infringed on and could not defend themselves against groups like the Klu Klux Klan.

From The Washington Post

Referring to the disarming of blacks during the post-Reconstruction era, Thomas wrote: “It was the ‘duty’ of white citizen ‘patrols to search negro houses and other suspected places for firearms.’ If they found any firearms, the patrols were to take the offending slave or free black ‘to the nearest justice of the peace’ whereupon he would be ‘severely punished.’ ” Never again, Thomas says.

In a scorcher of an opinion that reads like a mix of black history lesson and Black Panther Party manifesto, he goes on to say, “Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.”

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From the Washington Post:

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan faced tough questioning from Republican lawmakers Tuesday as the Senate Judiciary Committee began a second day of confirmation hearings.

The opening round of questioning comes a day after Kagan told the panel that she would bring a “modest” approach to the Supreme Court and show great deference to the other, elected branches of government.

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After hours of opening statements from senators and Kagan herself on Monday, the confirmation hearing for President Obama’s nominee to become the 112th justice of the nation’s highest court reconvened Tuesday at 9 a.m.

The committee chairman, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), began the day-long hearing by asking about Kagan’s family and about her response to criticism from Republicans for admiring the late justice Thurgood Marshall. The first African American to sit on the Supreme Court, Marshall is viewed by some GOP critics as the epitome of an “activist” judge.

Kagan defended her view of Marshall, for whom she clerked in 1988, telling the committee that he played a major role in making the principle of equal protection under the law a reality for minorities.

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Kagan Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings Begin

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WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee began a week of intense examination Monday by a Senate panel that will scrutinize her qualifications for a life term on the country’s highest legal authority.

In a highly charged partisan atmosphere, Republicans planned to focus on Elena Kagan’s lack of judicial experience and liberal political background, but she is expected to win approval from the Democrat-dominated panel and confirmation by the full Senate.

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Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, noted that Kagan, if confirmed, would be the fourth woman to take a seat on the high court. She also would be Obama’s second selection to don the robes of a justice. The first was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was seated on the court last year.

“No senator should seek to impose an ideological litmus test to secure promises of specific outcomes in cases coming before the Supreme Court,” Leahy said.

Before the hearing began, the White House released remarks Kagan plans to make at the opening session, in which she focused on the American tradition of equal justice under the law.

“What it promises is nothing less than a fair shake for every American,” Kagan planned to say.

The 50-year-old Kagan now serves Obama as solicitor general, the country’s top lawyer who represents the government in cases before the Supreme Court. She brings a stellar legal resume to the job, with the exception of never having served on the bench.

Her background includes education at Princeton, Oxford and Harvard. She served as a clerk under liberal court icon Thurgood Marshall, worked in private practice, taught at and became the first woman dean at Harvard Law and served in the White House under former President Bill Clinton.

Kagan will speak of her varied background and lessons she took from those assignments.

“I will listen hard, to every party before the Court and to each of my colleagues,” excerpts of Kagan’s statement said. “I will work hard. And I will do my best to consider every case impartially, modestly, with commitment to principle, and in accordance with law.”

She was expected to be a liberal stalwart on a court that became more conservative with appointments during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

While a liberal by background, Kagan’s ascension to the court was unlikely to change its liberal-conservative balance in that she will be replacing retiring Justice John Paul Stevens who has historically voted with his three liberal colleagues on the nine-judge panel. The court interprets the constitution as it applies to legal cases that have moved through lower courts.

The court is one of the United States three branches of government, along with the White House-run government administration and the lawmaking U.S. Congress. Under the Constitution, the president has the duty to nominate new justices when a seat on the court becomes vacant. The Senate then must confirm or reject the nominee. A president’s choice is rarely turned back by the Senate.

Republicans have complained loudly about Kagan’s lack of judicial experience and about her politics, but she was broadly expected to win approval before the Supreme Court ends its session in August. She would become the youngest member and only the fourth woman to sit on the Court. Her swearing-in would mark the first time three women have presided there at the same time.

In 1999 Clinton nominated her for a seat on the federal appeals court in Washington, but the Republican-controlled Senate never acted on her nomination. The seat eventually went to future Chief Justice John Roberts.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sees Kagan as a “dangerous nominee” given her relative youth, her thin legal record, liberal bent and an affinity for activist judges.

In a press conference at the conclusion of the weekend’s G-20 summit in Toronto, Obama rejected that argument.

He pointed out that Kagan “has the support, by the way, of a number of very conservative jurists who she’s worked with. So, as I examine some of the arguments that have been floated against her nomination over the last several weeks, it’s pretty thin gruel.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, the high court’s most outspoken conservative has framed Kagan’s lack of judicial experience as an asset.

With the nation in the midst of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and disarray in the Afghan war and its high command, Kagan’s hearing has received little of the ballyhoo that surrounded Obama’s first nominee, now-Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Regardless, Kagan’s hearing is taking place in an election year in which 36 seats in the Senate are up for grabs. Six are held by members of the Judiciary Committee.

Democrats were likely to promote Kagan’s pragmatic streak and her legal acumen. Republicans are examining her experience from other angles, particularly her lack of any time on the bench, her long political connections to Democratic causes and an incident during her tenure as dean at Harvard.

For a time she refused to give military recruiters access to the law school’s career services office, over the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy against openly gay soldiers. When the university was threatened with the loss of federal funding, she dropped the ban.

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution’s Second Amendment restrains government’s ability to significantly limit “the right to keep and bear arms,” advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices also signaled, however, that some limitations on the right could survive legal challenges.

Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.”

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with a unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.

Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities “limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values.

WASHINGTON — Want to invoke your right to remain silent? You’ll have to speak up.

In a narrowly split decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expanded its limits on the famous Miranda rights for criminal suspects on Tuesday — over the dissent of new Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said the ruling turned Americans’ rights of protection from police abuse “upside down.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, said a suspect who goes ahead and talks to police after being informed he doesn’t have to has waived his right to remain silent. Elena Kagan, who has been nominated by President Barack Obama to join the court, sided with the police as U.S. solicitor general when the case came before the court. She would replace Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the dissenters.

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A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are at the top of the warnings that police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But Tuesday’s majority said that suspects must break their silence and tell police they are going to remain quiet to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

This decision means that police can keep shooting questions at a suspect who refuses to talk as long as they want in hopes that the person will crack and give them some information, said Richard Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor.

“It’s a little bit less restraint that the officers have to show,” Friedman said.

The ruling comes in a case in which a suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich. He appealed his conviction, saying he had invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.

Kennedy, writing the decision for the court’s conservatives, said that wasn’t enough.

“Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police,” Kennedy said. “Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his ‘right to cut off questioning.’ Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent.”

He was joined in the 5-4 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Prosecutors cheered the decision, saying it takes the guesswork out of when police have to stop questioning suspects. “Is it too much to ask for a criminal suspect to say he doesn’t want to talk to police?” said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.

This is the third time this session that the Supreme Court has placed limits on Miranda rights, which come from a 1966 decision — it involved police questioning of Ernesto Miranda in a rape and kidnapping case in Phoenix — requiring officers to tell suspects they have the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer represent them, even if they can’t afford one.

Earlier this term, the high court ruled that a suspect’s request for a lawyer is good for only 14 days after the person is released from police custody — the first time the court has placed a time limit on a request for a lawyer — and that police do not have to explicitly tell suspects they have a right to a lawyer during an interrogation.

For Justice Sotomayor, deciding to make suspects speak to have the right to remain silent was a step too far. Sotomayor, the court’s newest member, wrote a strongly worded dissent for the court’s liberals, saying the majority’s decision “turns Miranda upside down.”

“Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent — which counterintuitively requires them to speak,” she said. “At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.”

She was joined in her dissent by Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

Supreme Court nominee Kagan had sided with the police in this case. As solicitor general, she told the Supreme Court that the Constitution “does not require that the police interpret ambiguous statements as invocations of Miranda rights.”

“An unambiguous-invocation requirement for the right to remain silent and terminate questioning strikes the appropriate balance between protecting the suspect’s rights and permitting valuable police investigation,” Kagan said in court papers.

Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and questioned by police for three hours. At the beginning, he was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering “yes,” ”no,” ”I don’t know,” nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for “shooting that boy down,” Thompkins said, “Yes.”

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he had invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati agreed and threw out his confession and conviction. The high court reversed that decision.

“In sum, a suspect who has received and understood the Miranda warnings, and has not invoked his Miranda rights, waives the right to remain silent by making an uncoerced statement to police,” Kennedy said. “Thompkins did not invoke his right to remain silent and stop the questioning. Understanding his rights in full, he waived his right to remain silent by making a voluntary statement to the police. The police, moreover, were not required to obtain a waiver of Thompkins’ right to remain silent before interrogating him.”

Sotomayor called that reasoning “a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination that Miranda v. Arizona has long provided during custodial interrogation.”

The case is Berghuis v. Thompkins, 08-1470.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As a young lawyer working for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Elena Kagan repeatedly expressed her concern that a conservative Supreme Court was looking for ways to cut back on the rights of women, criminal defendants and prisoners.

Documents from Kagan’s year with Marshall show a law clerk who was frequently assessing the politics of the institution. Her memos to the justice are on file in Marshall’s papers at the Library of Congress.

Kagan’s time with Marshall, the groundbreaking lawyer who argued against segregation and later became the first African-American on the court, is likely to be a subject at her confirmation hearing, scheduled to begin in late June. She would be only the sixth justice to have served as a law clerk for the high court, but the only one whose former boss’s papers were public at the time of her nomination.

RELATED: OPINION: Why Elena Kagan Is The Best Choice For We, The People

Some Senate Republicans already have signaled they could make issue an issue of Kagan’s clerkship with Marshall, whom conservatives have branded an activist judge more concerned about outcomes than rules.

“You can’t draw too many conclusions from these memos,” said University of Wisconsin law professor Brad Snyder, who has examined relationships between judges and clerks. “There’s a danger of saying if Kagan clerked for Marshall she must be an off-the-charts liberal. There’s no formula, but it will be interesting what she chooses to say about Thurgood Marshall, the judge, at her confirmation hearings.”

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Kagan, 27 when she began working for Marshall in 1987, said in Senate testimony last year that she tried to “channel” Marshall in her memos, not express her own views. Her concerns appear to echo Marshall’s well-established views.

“This case is likely to become the vehicle this court uses to create some very bad law on abortions and/or prisoners’ rights,” Kagan said in a memo in April 1988 about a dispute over abortions for women jail inmates. She advised Marshall to vote to reject an appeal from Monmouth County, N.J., even though she had reservations about a federal appeals court ruling in favor of the inmates.

Kagan said the decision requiring the county to pay for inmates’ elective abortions was “well-intentioned,” but “parts of it are ludicrous.” She said that women generally have no right to have their abortions paid for. “I do not see why prisoners should have such rights,” she said.

The court ultimately turned down the case.

RELATED: RAP SESSIONS: Another Black Harvard Professor Defends Kagan Nomination

Only once have a Supreme Court nominee’s writings from his days as a clerk ignited a controversy. In 1971, William Rehnquist was awaiting confirmation to the court when a memo surfaced from his time as a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson.

“I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed,” Rehnquist wrote in 1952 as Jackson and his colleagues considered whether to overturn the 56-year-old precedent and outlaw segregation in public schools.

Rehnquist explained that he was reflecting Jackson’s views, not his own, and he won confirmation in 1971 and then again, as chief justice, in 1986. Jackson’s papers had not yet been made public in 1971, but the memo got out anyway.

Three of the other four justices who once were clerks are serving on the court: John Roberts, the chief justice who worked for Rehnquist; Stephen Breyer, a clerk to Arthur Goldberg; and John Paul Stevens, a clerk for Wiley Rutledge.

Earlier, Byron White worked for Chief Justice Fred Vinson.

Sometimes, a justice’s views will align with the person he served. Stevens drew on Rutledge’s writings in his two opinions in favor of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base.

Breyer, like his former boss Goldberg, is on the court’s liberal side. “But he never says his jurisprudence was affected. He talks about how he approaches the job of working on a collegial court,” said Laura Krugman Ray, a Widener University law professor and author of an upcoming article on Breyer and Goldberg.

The lessons were especially important when Breyer is in dissent, Ray said. “He says, ‘That’s when I think about what Justice Goldberg would say. ‘Look, you lost. You made your best attempt. Don’t agonize. Move on,’” Ray said.

Kagan has spoken often of her admiration for Marshall, whom she regards as the greatest lawyer of the 20th century. By the time she worked for Marshall, he was nearing 80, in poor health and near the end of his court tenure.

RELATED: Republicans Attack Kagan’s Ties To Thurgood Marshall

The court, too, had changed since he had joined it in 1967, at the tail end of the Earl Warren court. By 1987, Justice William Brennan was the only other remaining link to the court’s liberal heyday.

Kagan’s memos take frequent notice of the change. She didn’t like the outcome of a state court’s review of a California law allowing police officers to detain children who are found out of school during school hours. A 17-year-old high school graduate challenged the law after police officers stopped him.

“I think the action here, as well as the judicial decision affirming it, is problematic,” she said. “I doubt, however that this Court would agree.”

In a lawsuit challenging prosecutors’ use of an attorney as an informant to help incriminate a suspect, Kagan said the action “was sufficiently offensive as to require dismissal of the indictment. I worry only that this court will not agree and will give prosecutors carte blanche to engage in this kind of activity.”

Kagan already has backed away from her comments in a legal fight over government funding for religious organizations. “It would be difficult for any religious organization to participate in such projects without injecting some kind of religious teaching,” she wrote in October 1987. The court allowed the religious groups to receive taxpayer money.

Last year, testifying at her hearing to become solicitor general, Kagan termed her analysis “the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

She probably also will be asked about a four-sentence memo from August 1987 in which she called for rejecting the appeal of a man convicted of carrying an unregistered gun in Washington, D.C.

“I’m not sympathetic,” Kagan wrote of the man’s claim. Twenty years later, the Supreme Court struck down Washington’s handgun ban in a decision that said individuals have a constitutional right to own guns for self-defense and other reasons.

RELATED: OPINION: Kagan’s Nomination Inches Supreme Court To The Right

In one area, Kagan took care when her view of the case was certain to differ from Marshall’s. Writing about a death sentence from Illinois, Kagan called the condemned inmate’s claim “pretty weak” and said of a lower court ruling upholding the death sentence, “I can’t honestly say that it was incorrect.”

Still, Marshall, who categorically opposed capital punishment, indicated that he would side with the inmate.

From NYTimes.com:

The Supreme Court said on Monday that the N.F.L. is an “unincorporated association of 32 separately owned professional football teams,” not a single business, for the purposes of selling branded jerseys and caps.

The unanimous ruling in American Needle Inc. v. National Football League was a reversal of a controversial lower-court ruling and amounted to a defeat for the league, which had sought protection from challenges to its business on antitrust grounds, legal experts said. In effect, the court said the N.F.L. was still open to antitrust scrutiny, as it has been for years.

The case was brought by American Needle, an apparel maker from Illinois that lost its contract with the league when the N.F.L. entered into an exclusive 10-year, $250 million deal with Reebok in late 2000 to produce hats, jerseys and other league-branded merchandise.

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American Needle argued that the league’s deal with Reebok violated antitrust law because the N.F.L. was a collection of individually owned teams that compete with one another, not a single entity able to negotiate contracts on behalf of its teams. By striking a deal with Reebok, the league effectively conspired to stifle competition, the company argued.

American Needle appealed to the Supreme Court after it lost a federal court ruling that favored the N.F.L.

Click here to read more.

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WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a group of African Americans did not wait too long to sue Chicago over a hiring test they challenged as discriminatory, freeing them to further press their case.

It is the second time in as many years that the high court has tackled discrimination in testing within the firefighting ranks. In a landmark case last year, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision said New Haven, Conn., violated white firefighters’ civil rights, throwing out an exam in which no African-Americans scored high enough to be promoted to lieutenant or captain.

In Monday’s opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court that the applicants’ lawsuit over a city of Chicago test used to weed out potential firefighter trainee applicants was not too late.

Anyone who scored 64 or below was deemed not qualified. But the city set a second cutoff score of 89 points.

Officials told applicants who scored below 89 but above 64 that although they passed the test, they likely would not be hired because of the large number of people who scored 89 or above. The majority of those in the top-scoring group were white; only 11 percent were black.

People are supposed to sue within 300 days after an employment action they seek to challenge as unlawful.

The city says the clock started when it announced the use of the test scores on Jan. 26, 1996. The first lawsuit in the case was filed on March 31, 1997, 430 days after the city announced the results.

But the plaintiffs say a new act of discrimination also happened each time the scores were used in hiring firefighter trainees between May 1996 and October 2001.

A U.S. District judge agreed with the black applicants, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision.

In Monday’s high court ruling, Scalia said: “It may be true that the City’s January 1996 decision to adopt the cutoff score (and to create a list of the applicants above it) gave rise to a freestanding disparate impact claim. … But it does not follow that no new violation occurred — and no new claims could arise — when the City implemented that decision down the road. If petitioners could prove that the City ‘used’ the ‘practice’ that ’causes a disparate impact,’ they could prevail.”

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From Politico:

Like the president who nominated her, Elena Kagan has steered clear of championing the old-line civil rights positions on race-based programs and preferences – putting her squarely in the centrist Democratic mainstream but at odds with the views of some of the party’s most loyal supporters in the minority community.

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It’s a career that reflects Kagan’s political coming-of-age at a moment when the notion of de-emphasizing race was at the core of Democratic politics. Her resume notably lacks a stint doing the kind of traditional civil-rights work that other Democratic nominees could point to, as evidence of their liberal credentials.

She could even be considered the Democrats’ first post-racial Supreme Court nominee, to borrow a phrase often applied to Barack Obama.

Few civil rights leaders have criticized Kagan’s nomination publicly – much as few black civil rights leaders have been willing to publicly criticize Obama, despite sometimes grumbling over his president-of-all-people reluctance to forge race-based solutions to problems like high minority unemployment.

But for the first time in decades, civil rights groups face the question of how much orthodoxy to insist on from a Democratic Supreme Court nominee.

Click here to read more.

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From CNN:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday the federal government has the power to keep some sex offenders behind bars indefinitely after they have served their sentences if officials determine those inmates may prove “sexually dangerous” in the future.

“The federal government, as custodian of its prisoners, has the constitutional power to act in order to protect nearby (and other) communities from the danger such prisoners may pose,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the 7-2 majority.

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At issue was the constitutionality of federal “civil commitment” for sex offenders who are nearing the end of their confinement or who are considered too mentally incompetent to stand trial.

The main plaintiff in the case, Graydon Comstock, was certified as dangerous six days before his 37-month federal prison term for processing child pornography was to end. Comstock and the others filing suit remain confined at Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, North Carolina.

Click here to read more.

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DR. BOYCE: Harvard/Yale Domination of Supreme Court Is Not Good

Many of us have followed the recent Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan, the former Dean of the Harvard Law School.  Her nomination process, thus far, has been quite contentious within the African American community, with several scholars and women’s groups opposing her racially-divisive hiring record.  The Black Women’s Roundtable found significant problems with the Kagan nomination, in large part because several qualified African American women were overlooked in the process.  The group even mentioned that the late Dorothy Height stated to President Obama, right before she died, that it’s time for black women to be represented in all sectors of government.  On the flip side, her nomination was supported by a few black male Harvard Law Professors, as well as the NAACP and the National Action Network.

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I would like to make it clear that I did not support the nomination of Kagan, along with Roland Martin, Professor Guy Charles (Duke University Law School), Dr. Marc Lamont Hill (Columbia University), Dr. Miriam Harris (a professor at Macalester College) and some others.  I also noticed that the one black female on the Harvard Law School faculty at the time of the Kagan nomination (Lani Guinier) was conspicuously silent while her male colleagues were touring the nation like MC Hammer.  I’d be surprised if they didn’t ask Lani to come out and support Kagan like everyone else.  Our reasons for challenging the Kagan nomination varied, ranging from her poor diversity record to her conservative disposition and lack of qualifications for the job.

RELATED: Kagan’s Black Harvard Colleague Says Criticism Is “Unfair”

One issue that was not raised as readily as it should have been is the fact that with the appointment of Kagan to the Supreme Court, the high court will be almost completely dominated by graduates of Harvard University and Yale University (Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia, but even she spent time at The Harvard Law School before transferring).  This sets a dangerous precedent in our legal system, threatening to make America into an aristocracy, where 99.9% of the population doesn’t matter.   There are brilliant legal minds who attend schools other than Harvard and Yale, and many of these promising young attorneys are going to be overlooked by individuals like Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas, who have less than stellar abilities that are over-ridden by solid gold connections.  President Obama has bought into the aristocracy and thus undermined his credibility with both everyday Americans and African American women.  He made a similar mistake last summer by standing with Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates during his dispute with a police officer, jumping into a minor battle without knowing the facts, thus causing him to be hammered at the polls.  Since that time, I haven’t seen either Obama or Gates engage in any significant effort to fight against racial profiling of poor black men in urban America.  Their standing together was not a black thing, it was a Harvard thing.

RELATED: RAP SESSIONS: Another Black Harvard Prof. Defends Kagan Nomination

I would speculate that the pressure put on black Harvard law professors to speak on behalf of Kagan translates to a consistent effort to strengthen the school’s political power.  As a colleague said to me behind closed doors, “This whole debate isn’t about what’s best for the black community.  It’s about who gets to have the biggest house on Martha’s Vineyard and a good relationship with a Supreme Court justice.”  Professors Kennedy, Ogletree and Sullivan (and Henry Louis Gates, who used his platform at TheRoot.com to promote commentary from his colleagues) hitting the campaign trail on behalf of Kagan is likely a matter of making sure that Harvard gets another touchdown by putting one of their own on the court.  All scholars are hard-pressed to find evidence that Kagan is willing to fight for the rights of rank and file African Americans, other than the fact that she was willing to accept a chair named after a black man and once worked for Thurgood Marshall.  What remains clear, however, is that Thurgood Marshall would not approve of a woman who hired zero African Americans during her time as Solicitor General of the United States.  Also, it’s interesting that supporters will give Kagan credit for bringing in conservative professors to the Harvard Law School, but then claim that she was not able to hire African American faculty.  You can’t exit a basketball game claiming to have scored all the points when you admit that you never handled the ball or had a turnover.

What I think about individual motivations for supporting Kagan is really not all that important.  What does matter is that there are many law schools across the nation with brilliant students coming out of them.   Outstanding students from Vanderbilt University, Indiana University, UCLA and other strong campuses should also have an opportunity to serve on the highest court in the land.  While one can certainly argue that many Harvard and Yale graduates are incredibly talented, we must remember that they are not perfect:  After all, George W. Bush got his undergraduate degree from Yale and his MBA from Harvard.  So, being from Harvard or Yale does not guarantee any form of intellectual superiority.  Simultaneously it can, as in the life of former President Bush, open doors for incompetent people to be chosen for opportunities over those who are far more capable.

The rest of the country may want to take notice of the game being played here.  With everyone rooting for their home team and engaging in the “gang warfare of higher education,” we may end up with a nation that is over-run by intellectual in-breeding and people taking care of their cronies instead of doing what’s best for our nation.  The Ivy League possesses several outstanding institutions (I turned down Columbia University for my PhD and my God daughter attends the school now), but they do not deserve the right to possess a disproportionate amount of our nation’s power.  America is a nation for the people, by the people, where most of the people are not at Harvard or Yale.  Let’s not kill our democracy.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the author of the book, “Black American Money.” To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that teenagers may not be locked up in prison for life with no chance of parole if they have not killed anyone.

By a 5-4 vote Monday, the court says the U.S. Constitution requires that young people serving life sentences must at least be considered for release.

The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17. Graham, now 22, is in prison in Florida, which holds more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for crimes other than homicide.

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“The state has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. “This the Eighth Amendment does not permit.”

Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with Kennedy and the court’s four liberal justices about Graham. But Roberts said he does not believe the ruling should extend to all young offenders who are locked up for crimes other than murder.

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I have read and listened to many different people give their take on the choice made by President Obama for the Supreme Court of the United States. And, after listening to both Republicans and democrats I realized one thing; THIS IS THE PERFECT CHOICE for WE THE PEOPLE!

Elena Kagan’s recorded speaks for itself: As a law clerk, Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom Kagan considers a hero and mentor. As a White House aide, Kagan worked on issues such as strengthening hate crimes legislation and civil rights enforcement. As a law school Dean, she worked to ensure a diverse student body and faculty. Recently, Kagan authorized the filing of an amicus brief by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education in a Fifth Circuit case, Fisher v. University of Texas. The brief defends the constitutionality of the University of Texas’ affirmative action program. In Lewis v. City of Chicago, Kagan filed a brief supporting African-American firefighters (represented by John Payton and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), who challenged a hiring test used by the City of Chicago under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

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Also, for the six years Kagan was dean, the percentage of African-Americans in the entering class was 11.6%, while in the previous six years it was 9.3%. During this time, the average number of black men enrolled in the entering class was 28 and the average
number of black women was 37, compared with 19 and 33, respectively, before Kagan’s deanship. Additionally, during Kagan’s deanship, the percentage of Hispanics in the entering class was 6.4%, while it had been 4.6% prior to her becoming dean. The average number of Hispanic men in the entering class was 20, compared to 14 in the previous six years. The average number of Hispanic women in the entering class was 19, compared to with 12 before Kagan’s deanship.

However, it’s not the record of fighting for equal rights that makes her the right choice. It’s three other reasons Kagan is the right choice here:

1. Kagan is what we want all Americans to be. Recently she was criticized for not being in touch with main street America because she went to the top schools in our country. The Washington Post’s Kathleen Harrington summed it best by writing, “…a New York City girl who attended a prep school, Ivy League colleges and law school — who once barred military recruiters from Harvard’s recruitment office and was an adviser to Goldman Sachs — can’t be characterized as anything close to mainstream America.” When did it become a crime to go to the top schools and work for corporate America? I was taught by my mom who was a single mom that education was the key to a great life and to try and go to the best of the best. I thought that this was a fabric in the American dream?

2. Kagan is being attacked from both the Republicans and the Democrats and that in its self tells me she is the right choice. We have a Court right now that for the most part decides cases by the parties lines in which they relate with the most. Kagan is an independent thinker and thus a wildcard and not under the control of a political party.

3. Lastly, Kagan will bring common sense to the law. As an attorney myself I have seen many brilliant lawyers forget to add that one key element when looking at the facts of the case and applying the law. I have no doubt that Kagan will do this just by looking at the decisions she has made thus far.

It is very clear to me that WE THE PEOPLE need someone on the Supreme Court who will be about protecting the Constitution and using common sense in the process. The Constitution is only 4543 words but we must always remember the words of Chief Justice John Marshall “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding.” With the times we will face ahead legally in our country we need someone like Kagan on the bench for WE THE PEOPLE to have a voice.

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Kagan’s Black Harvard Colleague Says Criticism Is “Unfair”

RAP SESSIONS: Another Black Harvard Prof. Defends Kagan Nomination

Bakari Kitwana speaks with Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan about the Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan. Critics of the Obama Administration have raised questions about Solicitor General Kagan’s minority hiring record when she was Dean of Harvard Law. Pointing to Kagan’s record on race and social justice, including her decision to refuse the oldest endowed chair at Harvard Law because of its connection to the Atlantic Slave Trade, Sullivan responds.

Specifically, he asserts that many of the criticisms leveled against Kagan are unfounded and taken out of context. While he concedes there are equally qualified Black women who were on Obama’s short list and who could have been nominated, he feels we should not “demean Kagan.”

Professor Ronald Sullivan is the Director of Harvard Criminal Justice Institute and Jamestown Project Fellow. As an attorney, he’s represented clients in local and federal courts across the US, including one of the Jena Six defendants. A Clinical Law Professor at Harvard, he was recruited four years ago by Elena Kagan to join the faculty at Harvard Law.

Bakari Kitwana is CEO of Rap Sessions, Editor at Large of Newsone.com and author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era. (Third World Press, 2010)

LISTEN HERE:

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I just did an appearance on MSNBC regarding Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  After being peppered with emails all morning from a member of The White House staff, who seemed disappointed that black scholars are coming out against Kagan, I did a short inventory of all the reasons that I cannot, in good conscience, support this woman for the Supreme Court.  How many reasons do black people have for NOT wanting Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court?  Let me count the ways:

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1) How do you hire 29 people, with 28 of them being white? While serving as dean at The Harvard Law School, Kagan did not hire a single African American tenured or tenure-track faculty member.  This says, very clearly, that Elena Kagan doesn’t care about black people, at least when they are applying to be professors.    It also says that with all the applications that poured in every year from top black attorneys, she didn’t feel that one single black, latino or native American scholar was qualified to teach at Harvard university.   How can a school that claims to have such strong minds hold onto such an ignorant belief system?

RELATED: OPINION: Left Is Mute On Racial Double Standard In Kagan Pick

2) Kagan didn’t hire any black people when she served as Solicitor General, either: Randall Kennedy, a black law professor at Harvard, came out in defense of Kagan, attempting to help us realize that she is Harriet Tubman in disguise – that she will whip off the mask and come through for black people in the end.  He also argues that Kagan didn’t have enough power as dean at Harvard to make any minority hires.  Alrighty then.  In my 17 years in academia, I’ve never once seen a dean who didn’t know how to make things happened if they wanted to.  But let’s assume that this is the case – that somehow Kagan, a woman with enough connections to be nominated for the Supreme Court, was somehow a powerless flunky at the Harvard Law School.  What did she do when she actually had hiring power as Solicitor General?  Nothing….nada….zippo.  Once again, she hired three white women, one white man, an Indian man and an Asian man.  Not one single Black, Native American or Latino person in the bunch.  I’m starting to see a trend here, are you?

RELATED: OPINION: Kagan’s Nomination Inches Supreme Court To Right

3) The same old Harvard/Chicago/Obama connection overrules actual credentials in the nomination process: Let’s be clear – Elena Kagan is not the best person for this job:  ]Kagan was selected because she is the most qualified white liberal friend of Barack Obama who was willing to take the job.  Her connections to The University of Chicago and Harvard University are the likely reasons she made it to Obama’s short list, for he has had no shame in showing his loyalty to other members of the Ivy League.  Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court would be a Harvard/Yale sweep of the court, a tremendous insult to the other outstanding legal minds who didn’t go to Harvard or Yale.

I was very happy to see black law professors take a stand against the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.  T’he reality is that she is nothing more than a clear reflection of the racist, elitist power structure, and does nothing to represent hope or change from a president who has trouble delivering either.  I respect Barack Obama and appreciate political pragmatism, but black and brown people as a collective do not need to remain at the back of the bus.  It’s time for real change and Kagan is certainly not it.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the author of the book, “Black American Money.” To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.

From The Loop 21:

Yesterday, President Obama nominated United States Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. Few were surprised by the choice, as Kagan has long been viewed a frontrunner for the high court. While many observers have applauded Obama’s decision, others like myself were left with a lingering question.

Is this really the best we could do?

Let’s be clear, I am not questioning Kagan’s basic qualifications as a nominee. Unlike those who have questioned her “temperament” and “intellectual curiosity”—loaded queries that only seem to get raised in relation to women and minority candidates—I have little doubt about Kagan’s fitness for the job. Rather, I am concerned about Kagan’s ability to fill John Paul Stevens’ shoes as the progressive anchor of the Supreme Court.

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Although she undoubtedly shares the same political persuasion as Justice Stevens, Kagan is considerably less progressive on major issues of the day. While Stevens has filed numerous dissents in an effort to challenge the Bush (and now Obama) doctrine of endless executive power, Kagan has dutifully argued in favor of policies that undermine the spirit and letter of the Constitution. For example, during her confirmation hearing for Solicitor General, Kagan offered unequivocal support for the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists as well as the bizarre belief that the entire world is a battleground. On other issues, from gay marriage to civil rights, Kagan has done nothing to inspire confidence that she would continue Stevens’ tradition of principled and rigorous resistance.

The choice of Kagan is even more disappointing when examining the other viable option. Diane Wood, a highly respected judge who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has a long and successful record of defending the Constitution from the onslaught of right-wing jurists. Also, like Justice Stevens, Wood has also demonstrated the ability to persuade conservative judges to change their opinion on controversial cases. In addition, Wood’s Protestant faith and non-Ivy League education would have added another layer of diversity to the court. While Wood was certainly a more contentious choice, there is little doubt that she would have been confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Click here to read more.

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From HuffingtonPost.com:

By Randall L. Kennedy

Elena Kagan’s nomination for a place on the Supreme Court should be welcomed enthusiastically by those who are especially concerned with advancing the cause of racial justice in America. She is knowledgeable about the history of our nation’s racial problems and committed to a vision of racial inclusiveness that reflects the best of our national traditions. I say this on the basis of an acquaintanceship with Kagan that dates back almost twenty-five years.

She was in one of the first classes on race relations law that I taught at Harvard Law school. I recall vividly that she was an outstanding student — so much so that I recommended her with superlatives to my former boss Justice Thurgood Marshall. I thought that she would be an excellent clerk for him partly because she was so able analytically and also because her quiet but passionate commitment to equality before the law would fit in so well with “Mr. Civil Rights.” I was delighted when Justice Marshall offered her the clerkship and was unsurprised later when the Justice told me that her work for him had been exemplary.

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Over time Kagan became a colleague at Harvard and then my Dean. In all of these roles she has comported herself with the same qualities that prompted me to recommend her so highly to Justice Marshall. There has been some grousing in the media about the paucity of racial minorities hired during Kagan’s Deanship. The criticisms leveled at her are unfair.

Click here to read more.

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From Salon:

Like everyone in the legal academy over the last decade, we have watched with admiration the amazing changes that Elena Kagan brought to Harvard Law School. A fractured faculty, divided among ideological lines, seemed finally content, if not united. A boisterous student body was finally pacified. The logjam that had stopped faculty hiring had burst. Indeed, she hired so many new faculty the Harvard Law School’s newspaper’s 2008 April Fool’s issue declared, “Dean Kagan Hires Every Law Professor in the Country.”

The first woman Dean of Harvard Law School had presided over an unprecedented expansion of the faculty — growing it by almost a half. She had hired 32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members (non-clinical, non-practice). But when we sat down to review the actual record, we were frankly shocked. Not only were there shockingly few people of color, there were very few women. Where were the people of color? Where were the women? Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women. All this in the 21st Century.

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One of us aired some of these concerns, which we expressed in a joint letter to the White House, on a blog. The White House never responded directly to us, but it did provide a defense of the Solicitor General’s record to concerned civil rights groups, who then made the document public. (Salon obtained a copy, which can be found here.) We are glad that the White House has responded to some of the questions that we have raised.

Unfortunately, the White House’s defense of the solicitor general’s hiring record while she was Dean at Harvard is surprisingly weak.

To begin, and most notably, the White House does not dispute our basic facts. When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, four-out-of-every five hires to its faculty were white men. She did not hire a single African American, Latino, or Native American tenured or tenure track academic law professor. She hired 25 men, all of whom were white, and seven women, six of whom were white and one Asian American. Just 3 percent of her hires were non-white — a statistic that should raise eyebrows in the 21st Century.

Click here to read more.

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Obama Nominates Kagan To Supreme Court

From CNN.com:

Editor’s note: Roland S. Martin, a CNN political analyst, is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of “Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith” and the new book “The First: President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House.” He is a commentator for TV One Cable Network and host of a Sunday morning news show.

(CNN) — If a white Republican president of the United States appointed a white male as his next Supreme Court justice, and upon the inspection of his record, it was discovered that of the 29 full-time tenured or tenured track faculty he hired as dean of Harvard Law, nearly all of them were white men, this would dominate the headlines.

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It would be reasonable to conclude that the special interest groups that vigorously fight for diversity — civil rights organizations, feminist groups and other liberal institutions — would be up in arms, declaring that this person’s records showed him unwilling to diversify academia, and unqualified to consider diverse views as one of nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court. There would be widespread condemnations of Republicans having no concern for the nonwhite males in America.

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But what if the choice were made by a black Democratic president, and it was a woman? A white woman? A white Democratic woman?

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Some of you may not like the fact that I am focusing on the race of the individual, but when diversity is raised, the person’s skin color, gender and background are considered germane to the discussion. And if there is silence from black and female organizations, their race and gender matter as well.

We may very well witness this now that President Obama has selected Solicitor General Elena Kagan to replace the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.

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From The Hill:

Republicans are questioning Elena Kagan’s ties to a liberal icon and the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall.

In its first memo to reporters since Kagan’s nomination to the high court became public, the Republican National Committee highlighted Kagan’s tribute to Marshall in a 1993 law review article published shortly after his death.

Kagan quoted from a speech Marshall gave in 1987 in which he said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.”

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Marshall cited in particular the definition in the original Constitution to slaves as representing three-fifths of “free Persons” when counting the nation’s population. That reference was rendered moot with the ratification, following the Civil War, of the 13th and 14th Amendments abolishing slavery and granting full citizenship to all people born in the U.S.

Kagan quoted him as saying the Supreme Court’s mission was to “show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.”

“Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?” the RNC asked in its research document. “And Does Kagan Still Believe That The Supreme Court’s Primary Mission Is To ‘Show A Special Solicitude For The Despised And Disadvantaged’?”

The Republican national chairman, Michael Steele, also used Kagan’s tribute to Marshall in a statement responding to her nomination.

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If confirmed by the Senate, Kagan would become the third woman on the high court. Obama introduced her in the White House East Room as “my friend.”

The former Harvard Law School dean “is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal minds,” Obama said.

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Kagan, 50, said she was “honored and humbled by this nomination.”

“I look forward to working with the Senate and thank you, Mr. President, for this honor of a lifetime.”

Obama cited what he called Kagan’s “openness to a broad array of viewpoints” and her “fairmindedness.”

In a statement issued before Kagan had completed her remarks, the lawmaker who will preside over her confirmation hearing, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, said, the Senate should confirm Ms. Kagan by early September, a month before the court returns from recess.

“Our constituents deserve a civil and thoughtful debate on this nomination,” followed by an yes or no vote, he said.

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[8:22 p.m. - 5/10/2010] – Source: Elena Kagan To Be Nominated To Supreme Court

WASHINGTON – Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be nominated Monday to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, a person familiar with the president’s thinking says, positioning the high court to have three women justices for the first time.

Obama plans to announce his choice at 10 a.m. in the East Room of the White House. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision, which came after a monthlong search, had not been made public. Shortly before 8 a.m., Kagan emerged from her Washington, D.C., apartment, got into the back seat of a vehicle and was driven away. She did not acknowledge the photographers and reporters who had gathered to await her appearance.

Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. She was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, first woman to serve as the top Supreme Court lawyer for any administration, and now first in Obama’s mind to succeed legendary liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.

At 50 years old, Kagan would be the youngest justice on the court, which would give her the opportunity to extend Obama’s legacy for a generation.

Kagan must first win Senate confirmation.

A source close to the selection process said a central element in Obama’s choice was Kagan’s reputation for bringing together people of competing views and earning their respect.

Kagan came to the fore as a candidate who had worked closely with all three branches of government, a legal mind with both a sense of modesty and sense of humor. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss factors that led to Kagan’s impending nomination.

Kagan has clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked for Bill Clinton and earned a stellar reputation as a student, teacher and manager of the elite academic world. Her standing has risen in Obama’s eyes as his government’s lawyer before the high court over the last year.

Yet Kagan would be the first justice without judicial experience in almost 40 years. The last two were William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell Jr., both of whom joined the court in 1972.

All of the three other finalists she beat out for the job are federal appeals court judges, and all nine of the current justices served on the federal bench before being elevated.

Kagan’s fate will be up to a Senate dominated by Democrats, who with 59 votes have more than enough to confirm her, even though they are one shy of being able to halt any Republican stalling effort.

For the second straight summer, the nation can expected an intense Supreme Court confirmation debate even though, barring a surprise, Kagan is likely to emerge as a justice.

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Supreme Court justices wield enormous power over the daily life of Americans. Any one of them can cast the deciding vote on matters of life and death, individual freedoms and government power. Presidents serve four-year terms; justices have tenure for life.

Republicans have shown no signs in advance that they would try to prevent a vote on Kagan, but they are certain to grill her in confirmation hearings over her experience, her thin record of legal writings and her objections to the military’s policy about gays.

When she was confirmed as solicitor general in 2009, only seven Republicans backed her.

Democrats went 15 years without a Supreme Court appointment until Obama chose federal appellate judgeSonia Sotomayor last year to succeed retiring Justice David Souter. Just 16 months in office, Obama has a second opportunity with Kagan, under different circumstances.

Obama’s decision last year centered much on the compelling narrative of Sotomayor, the first HispanicSupreme Court justice, who grew up in a housing project and overcame hardship.

This year, Obama particularly wanted someone who could provide leadership and help sway fellow justices toward a majority opinion. The president has grown vocal in his concern that the conservative-tilting court is giving too little voice to average people.

Kagan is known for having won over liberal and conservative faculty at the difficult-to-unite Harvard Law School, where she served as dean for nearly six years.

Her background, including time as a lawyer and a key domestic policy aide in President Clinton’s White House, would give the court a different perspective.

The White House is expected to frame Kagan’s lack of service as a judge in upbeat terms, underscoring that there are many qualified routes to the top of the judiciary.

Kagan, who is unmarried, was born in New York City. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s degree from Oxford and a law degree from Harvard.

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She served as a Supreme Court clerk for one of her legal heroes, Justice Thurgood Marshall. And before that, she clerked for federal appeals court judge Abner Mikva, who later became an important political mentor to Obama in Chicago.

Kagan and Obama both taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1990s.

In her current job, Kagan represents the U.S. government and defends acts of Congress before the Supreme Court and decides when to appeal lower court rulings.

Kagan has the high task of following Stevens, who leaves a legacy that includes the preservation of abortion rights, protection of consumer rights and limits on the death penalty and executive power. He used his seniority and his smarts to form majority votes.

Rick Garnett, a professor of law and associate dean of University of Notre Dame Law School, voiced the concern of many conservatives.

“Future elections might undo some of the president’s policies, but his more liberal views about the Constitution, the powers of the national government, and the role of unelected federal judges, are now being locked in securely,” Garnett said in a statement.

Kagan would be the fourth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, following current Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

She would be the third Jewish justice along with six Catholics. With Stevens’ retirement, the court will have no Protestants, the most prevalent denomination in the United States.

From LATimes.com:

As President Obama considers nominees to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, a debate bubbles as to whether religion should play a role in his choice.

This is a no-brainer. The religious views of the next justice of the high court must absolutely be a decisive factor.

Though the court without Stevens will be left with six Catholics and two Jews, the open seat should not go to either domination. Nor should it go to a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Muslim or even a Zoroastrian. If it did, that would make nine people who all have one religious principle in common: a belief in religion.

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Clearly, the next person to take the bench should be an atheist.

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From TheHill.com:

The Congressional Black Caucus plans to meet this week to plot its strategy for the upcoming Supreme Court nomination.

Caucus chairwoman Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) has urged President Barack Obama to consider a minority or woman candidate to replace the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. In a statement earlier this month, Lee said it was “essential that President Obama consider gender and ethnic diversity on the high court in an increasingly diverse America.” At an appropriations hearing last week, Lee also tangled with Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s sole African-American jurist, over the lack of diversity among its clerks.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) is leading the caucus’s approach to judicial nominations. She told The Hill that she would recommend that the caucus “take no position on a specific name yet.” She added, however, that “the caucus should be concerned if we get a nominee that appears to be considerably less progressive than the retiring Justice Stevens.”

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The caucus appears to be adopting a lower profile in the selection process after a number of members floated the name of one of their own, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), last year for the seat that ultimately went to Sonia Sotomayor.

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Obama Talking With Possible Supreme Court Nominees

WASHINGTON — Pushing forward with one of his most consequential decisions, President Barack Obama has begun informal talks with potential nominees for the Supreme Court. And now he is reaching out to the senators who will control the confirmation fight ahead.

Obama was to meet Wednesday with the top Democrat and Republican in the Senate, along with leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as he launches a period of political protocol that comes with each high court nomination. The White House says the point is for Obama to get advice from the senators on how to proceed and even ideas of people to consider, but his goal is also to show bipartisanship, even if the debate to follow is almost sure to have a divided tone.

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At the White House, Obama will gather with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee.

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Within a few weeks, Obama is expected to announce a nominee to replace longtime Justice John Paul Stevens, who is retiring this summer. This is Obama’s second chance in less than a year to name someone to the Supreme Court, a presidential prerogative that could put his imprint on the judicial branch for decades. Stevens announced his retirement plans on April 9, and Obama is still believed to be in the early stages of making his decision.

The nominee will be subject to Senate confirmation.

Obama has begun conversations with potential nominees, a senior administration official said Tuesday, signaling an upswing in the president’s consideration of an already coalescing list of about 10 candidates. Those discussions have not been formal interviews, the administration official emphasized, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of Obama’s deliberations. In his search last year, Obama ultimately did four face-to-face interviews with finalists.

He ended up choosing federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice David Souter. Sotomayor’s confirmation was a largely partisan summertime battle, with most Republicans objecting to her and to Obama’s standards for choosing justices in general. The Senate vote was 68-31, with nine Republicans in favor.

So far, the early signs of ideological divide are the same.

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Many Republican senators are wary that Obama will seek out a judicial activist who will bring a liberal agenda to the bench, and the White House already is expecting what chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called a “huge, huge battle” from Republicans over whomever Obama picks. The president says he will choose someone with the expected credentials of a strong record and dedication to the rule of law, plus an understanding of how court rulings affect people in real life.

With 59 usually reliable votes from Democrats and independents in the Senate, Obama is in a strong position to pick the person he wants. He would need 60 votes to head off a filibuster. Obama aides are confident that they can get that support and that Republicans won’t go that route anyway.

Among the people Obama is considering for the court are federal appeals court judges Diane Wood, Merrick Garland and Sidney Thomas, former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow.

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