First Amendment Rights RSS feed for topic: First Amendment Rights en Hobby Lobby and Obamacare: Aborted, once more THE Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, has been battered again and again since its enactment in 2010. On June 30th it got its latest beating, this time from the Supreme Court. The justices ruled that a company can, indeed, bring religious objections against Obamacare.In the case,&nbsp;Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc, the court ruled that closely held companies can refuse to offer workers coverage of contraception without facing fines. The case was brought by two Christian families and their businesses: the Greens own Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft shops, and Mardel, a Christian bookstore; the Hahns own Conestoga Wood Specialties, a cabinet company.&nbsp;Obamacare requires firms to offer their workers health coverage, including coverage of contraception at no extra cost to the employee. The Greens and Hahns believe that some of those contraceptives, which may keep a fertilised egg from implanting in the uterine wall, amount to abortion. Federal law defines pregnancy from implantation, not fertilisation. Nevertheless, the issue before the court was&nbsp;not whether the Greens’ religious beliefs were valid. Rather, the question was whether a company can be exempt from federal law because its owners have religious objections.The First Amendment protects the right to the “free exercise” of religion. A law passed in 1993, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Mon, 30 Jun 2014 15:42:43 +0000 21606154 at The Supreme Court: Guns and lies “PANTS on fire” is the lowest rating on PolitiFact’s "Truth-O-Meter". Alas, this badge of shame has done little to deter politicians and their acolytes from stretching the truth now and again. So some states have decided to take matters into their own hands. In Ohio, for example, anyone making a false statement about a candidate during a campaign risks jail time and a $5,000 fine. But does this violate the First Amendment rights of all citizens, including the deceitful?In&nbsp;a Supreme Court ruling on&nbsp;Susan B Anthony List v Driehaus&nbsp;on&nbsp;June 16th, the justices unanimously furrowed their brows at Ohio’s ban without resolving whether it violates anyone's freedom of speech. The&nbsp;constitutional&nbsp;challenge to the state’s law came from two advocacy groups, and the justices gave them permission to press on. Lower-court rulings had found that the groups lacked standing to sue, since they did not face any imminent injury under the law. The Supreme Court, however, held that the “threat” of criminal prosecution for dubious campaign literature “suffices to create an...injury under the circumstances of this case.”The dispute arose in 2010 when an Ohio congressman rankled at this billboard: “Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion.” The message was courtesy of Susan B Anthony List (SBA), a pro-life advocacy group, and the allegation ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Wed, 18 Jun 2014 05:12:37 +0000 21604486 at Europe, faith and liberty: How Europe defines religious freedom LAST week, my colleagues in America were kept very busy by a Supreme Court hearing which touched some sensitive nerves: it concerned two firms run by devout Christians who object to implementing parts of the Obamacare health-care mandate which require them to offer contraceptive services to their employees. To understand the red-hot sensitivity of the case, you have to know not just the details of the arguments submitted, but the broader context formed by America's understanding of religious freedom. It is common to hear Americans draw a sharp contrast between their country's religious order and that of Europe.So what exactly is the difference? That's too big a question for one Erasmus posting, so let's divide the matter into two parts, theory and practice. The fundamentals of America's religious order are summed up in the first 16 words of the First Amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."). This elegant form of words, on whose interpretation millions of words have been expended, has no precise equivalent in Europe. The "free exercise" of religion is guaranteed, albeit with qualifications, by Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which all 47 members of the Council of Europe have signed. &nbsp;&nbsp;Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience&nbsp;and ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Mon, 31 Mar 2014 18:00:48 +0000 21599925 at The Economist explains: How America defines religious freedom ON MARCH 25th the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Sebelius v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v Sebelius.&nbsp;These cases present the first major legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, since the Court upheld most of it two years ago. They concern the "contraceptive mandate"—the act's requirement that businesses that offer their employees health insurance must provide plans that cover all federally-approved contraception methods at no additional cost to their employees.&nbsp;Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties are both owned by Christians who believe that four of those contraceptive methods are tantamount to abortion, because they prevent a fertilised egg from implanting in the uterus. They seek an exemption to the contraceptive mandate on religious grounds, which the administration has granted to some churches and religiously affiliated nonprofits. The government argues that the religious beliefs of a for-profit corporation's owners do not justify an exemption. How does American law accommodate religious freedom in cases such as this?The First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or preventing the free exercise thereof". This "Free Exercise Clause", as it has become known, is not absolute: the devout cannot stone ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Mon, 24 Mar 2014 23:50:00 +0000 21599488 at Obamacare and the first amendment: An uneasy tension IN 2010 the Supreme Court held that corporations had a right to free speech that the first amendment protects. Next year they look set to decide whether corporations also have religious freedoms that the first amendment similarly protects. This morning the court granted certiorari to two linked cases: Conestoga Wood Specialities Corporation v Sebelius (about which my colleague has&nbsp;written before) and Sebelius v Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Both cases ask fundamentally the same question: can secular, for-profit corporations refuse to provide their employees with insurance coverage for contraceptive methods that violate their religious beliefs, in violation of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) mandate that employer-provided health insurance cover all contraceptive methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration?Lower courts delivered contradictory rulings. The Tenth Circuit held that Hobby Lobby's owners have standing to sue under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which forbids government from "substantially burden[ing] a person's exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability" except to further a compelling government interest. The Tenth Circuit held, first, that Hobby Lobby's owners were "persons" for RFRA's purposes, and that the government's bright-line distinction between non-profit and for-profit entities, with ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Tue, 26 Nov 2013 21:54:47 +0000 21590839 at Religious liberty and the Supreme Court: Endorsing the endorsement test AMONG the many consequential cases to be heard by the Supreme Court this term is Town of Greece v Galloway, a clash over the meaning of the first-amendment rule that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. Some believe the court should take this opportunity to reject the “no endorsement” interpretation of this provision first articulated in 1984 by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In her concurring opinion in Lynch v Donnelly, Justice O’Connor agreed with four of her colleagues that the inclusion of a nativity scene in a public Christmas display does not violate the constitution, but her reasoning grew out of a novel approach to the provision:The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person's standing in the political community. Government can run afoul of that prohibition...[by] endorsement or disapproval of religion. Endorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.The way to determine whether the government is impermissibly “endorsing” religion, the courts later decided, is not to canvass actual citizens but to imagine how a reasonable observer would look upon a creche, a ten commandments display, a cross or ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Tue, 08 Oct 2013 17:58:28 +0000 21587470 at Obamacare and religious liberty: A corporate conscience? WHEN the Citizens United decision came down in 2010, 80% of Americans were unhappy to learn that political speech by corporations was protected under the first amendment. Three years later an effort to undermine Obamacare by expanding the constitutional rights of corporations is quietly gaining ground in the courts. The campaign, summarised here, includes some 73 cases challenging the law’s requirement that health-insurance plans provided by large employers include coverage for birth control. (A limited exemption—which Republicans are trying to expand—applies to religious organisations.) This contraceptive mandate, detractors say, presents organisations owned by religious individuals opposed to certain forms of birth control with a dilemma: abandon their beliefs or pay a hefty fine of up to $100 per employee per day.Conestoga Wood Specialties, a cabinet manufacturer with 950 employees in Pennsylvania, is one of the plaintiffs challenging the mandate. Conestoga is owned and run by the Hahns, a Mennonite family that considers two forms of birth control—the emergency contraceptives known as Plan B and ella—to be the sinful taking of embryonic life. The family has objected to Obamacare's mandate on constitutional grounds and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a 1993 law requiring that “substantial burdens” on religious exercise be justified by a compelling ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 03 Oct 2013 13:50:24 +0000 21586780 at Faith and the Obama administration: Two degrees of separation A UNIQUE mixture of political and spiritual power was on view today as the world watched the inaugural mass of Pope Francis, with representatives of over 130 governments, including 31 heads of state, in attendance. The Argentine pontiff emphasised his personal preference for modesty and simplicity with some subtle gestures, such as ordering up a ring made mainly of silver, rather than the expected solid gold one. But there are limits to simplicity in an institution whose head combines the roles of spiritual and moral leader and head of a sovereign power which has diplomatic relations with most of the world's countries and permanent observer status at the United Nations. (Technically it is the Holy See, in other words the Catholic hierarchy, that maintains diplomatic relations, not the tiny patch of land known as the Vatican City; but in any case the pope is in charge of both.)A few days before the Catholic church's earthly and religious power were on global display, the Obama administration (represented in Rome today by Vice-President Joseph Biden) signalled its own very different idea of the proper relationship between church and state. It did so by giving a senior job to a high-powered lawyer who takes a sophisticated liberal view, in American terms, of the terms on which government and faiths should interact. Melissa Rogers is the new director of the White House Office ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:21:21 +0000 21573766 at Church and state: Rebuild the wall? THE perennial debate about religion and politics in America has a new point of reference: a bill passed a few weeks ago by a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives to permit the allocation of federal disaster relief money for the reconstruction of houses of worship damaged last fall during Hurricane Sandy. The bill is vigorously opposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the organisation that distributes relief funds. The editorial board of the New York Times is against the proposed change, as is the American Civil Liberties Union. (The Anti-Defamation League initially objected to the bill, but has backtracked.) Opponents are worried that the move will breach the constitutional “wall of separation” between church and state—a metaphorical partition introduced to American jurisprudence by Thomas Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.The dual religion clauses of the first amendment trace a tricky path for public policy. The Establishment Clause prevents the government from being too friendly toward religion: no endorsement of religious doctrines, no favouring specific faiths or religion over non-religion, no excessive entanglement between state institutions and religious organisations. The Free Exercise Clause, meanwhile, prohibits the state from obstructing religious practice, discriminating against religious organisations or ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:06:29 +0000 21573100 at Rating agencies: Free speech or knowing misrepresentation? IT IS beyond argument that ratings agencies did a horrendous job evaluating mortgage-tied securities before the financial crisis hit. Whether that failure was a crime has long been a matter of debate, particularly because no other entity—including America’s federal regulators—did any better.On February 5th the Department of Justice (DoJ) weighed in, filing a complaint against Standard &amp; Poor’s (S&amp;P) in a Los Angeles federal court. The complaint charges that the ratings agency "limited, adjusted and delayed updates to the rating criteria and analytical models" needed to evaluate risk, and, based on information from an unnamed executive, did so deliberately to protect its business. <div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:20:25 +0000 21571352 at Freedom of speech: Squawk STRANGELY, we seem to be getting a parade of free-speech issues in the news of late. If you'd asked me six months ago which political memes were likely to trend this year, I definitely wouldn't have picked freedom of expression or sexual-orientation issues, but there you have it: Chick-fil-A. Glenn Greenwald, Scott Lemieux, Adam Serwer&nbsp;and a host of other supporters of gay rights have already done an admirable job of explaining why local governments should not, and probably constitutionally cannot, deny zoning permits to Chick-fil-A affiliates purely on the basis of its CEO's expressed opposition to same-sex marriage. But I thought it was worth noting this comment by Joe Moreno, a Chicago alderman, one of several municipal government officials who have declared they want to block local affiliates of the chain.The alderman, serving his first full term, dismissed any First Amendment concerns."You have the right to say what you want to say, but zoning is not a right," he said, adding that he also had concerns about traffic in the area.It always surprises me how widespread the misunderstanding on this point is. The thing is, with regard to the law, motive matters. Mr Moreno is right: zoning is not a right, and the local government can deny you approval to open your fast-food franchise. But freedom of expression is a right, and the local government can't deny you ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Mon, 30 Jul 2012 13:53:18 +0000 21559767 at The Q&A: Nick Cohen: An unprecedented age of censorship NICK COHEN, a British journalist and author, is a polemicist. His views have swung from the left to the right and back again over his 30-year career, but his arguments are often punchy and persuasive. In “You Can&#39;t Read This Book” (Fourth Estate), his sixth book, he argues that we are living in an unprecedented age of censorship, coerced by violence, religion and money.&nbsp;The book opens in 1989 at the end of the cold war, a time when many believed that liberal democracy would spread and freedom of speech would flourish. It was also the year that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, for his supposedly blasphemous book, “The Satanic Verses”.&nbsp;Mr Cohen uses the Rushdie fiasco as a springboard to discuss censorship, and the correlation between Islamic fundamentalism and the suppression of free thinking in the West, both in society and online. His argument borrows heavily from the works of writers such as George Orwell, John Milton and John Stuart Mill—especially Mill&#39;s principle that censorship should only be applied in extreme circumstances.&nbsp;We spoke to Mr Cohen about censorship, religion and freedom of speech.&nbsp;What made you want to write a book about censorship?Firstly, it was watching a Russian oligarch with a criminal record using the libel law in Britain to silence all newspapers that wrote articles about him. ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:40:53 +0000 21545865 at Religion in America: The faith (and doubts) of our fathers UK Only Article:&nbsp; standard article Issue:&nbsp; A comedy of euros Fly Title:&nbsp; Religion in America Rubric:&nbsp; What did the makers of America believe about God and religion? The subject is stirring the very rancour they wanted to avoid Location:&nbsp; Washington, DC Main image:&nbsp; 20111217_CFD001_0.jpg IN THE year of our Lord 1816 two grand old men of the American Revolution corresponded eagerly about the work they had recently done, in their rural retirement, on the Bible. Ex-President Thomas Jefferson thanked his old friend Charles Thomson, a co-sponsor of the Declaration of Independence, for sending a copy of his newly completed synopsis of the Gospels. At a time when many modern Americans are arguing feverishly over the real significance of the nation&#39;s religious and political beginnings, such letters can be dynamite. So let the contents of this exchange be noted carefully. Thomson, like most members of the first American Congress, which ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:00:44 +0000 21541718 at Buying the election: Foreigners and campaign advertising THE first amendment's free-speech protection language reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." That sounds pretty simple and all-embracing, and in its Citizens United decision this spring, simple and all-embracing was the way the Supreme Court interpreted it. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion held that the government could not bar corporations from spending as much as they want to on political advertising, at any point in an election season, because to do so would be to discriminate against political speech on the basis of the identity of the speaker (in this case, the fact that the speaker is a corporation). Others, notably Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, quickly noted that this reasoning implied that the government could not bar foreign persons from spending as much as they want to on political advertising in an American election. But rather than answer these concerns, as elections law expert Richard Hasen wrote yesterday in Slate (via Jesse Zwick), Mr Kennedy "punted", putting off the question for some later case. And in fact, Mr Hasen writes, the logic of Citizens United dictates that foreigners ought to be able to buy political advertising in American elections.In Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that U.S. corporations have the right to spend unlimited sums in U.S. elections. That ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Tue, 12 Oct 2010 18:04:50 +0000 21011784 at The Supreme Court and discrimination: When rights clash Issue:&nbsp; Earthly powers Fly Title:&nbsp; The Supreme Court and discrimination Rubric:&nbsp; Can a Christian student group discriminate against unrepentant gays? Location:&nbsp; Washington, DC Main image:&nbsp; Not envisaged by the Founding Fathers Not envisaged by the Founding Fathers A GENERATION ago, gays felt the system was stacked against them. These days, at least on liberal university campuses, it is fundamentalist Christians who feel beleaguered. On April 19th the Supreme Court heard a case about a clash between the two groups. At issue is whether a public university&#39;s rules barring discrimination against gays should trump the right of the faithful to practice their religion. At the Hastings College of the Law, an arm of the University of California in San Francisco, a student group called the Christian Legal Society (CLS) wants to be led only by those who share its beliefs. These include the notion that sex outside of traditional marriage is immoral. Gays are allowed to join the group, as indeed are other “sinners”, but only if they ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:36:44 +0000 15959358 at Free speech and campaign cash: Unbound Issue:&nbsp; The book of Jobs Fly Title:&nbsp; Free speech and campaign cash Rubric:&nbsp; The Supreme Court undermines convoluted campaign-finance rules Location:&nbsp; Washington, dc Main image:&nbsp; Illustration by Claudio Munoz Illustration by Claudio Munoz A LOT of politicians were rattled by the Supreme Court on January 21st. By a 5-4 majority the court ruled that corporations, unions and ideological groups can spend as much money as they like on political advertisements at election time. “This ruling strikes at our democracy itself,” warned Barack Obama on January 23rd. It “opens the floodgates”, he said, for corporations to “interfere with elections by running advertisements for or against candidates”, such as himself. He vowed to fight for legal ways to undermine the ruling. The case concerned a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie”, which portrays Mrs Clinton as a lying, power-hungry viper. The movie&#39;s makers, a conservative group called Citizens United, wanted to release it via cable during the Democratic primaries in 2008, when Mrs ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:40:26 +0000 15394247 at Sotomayor says "Shut up" I WAS in the Supreme Court yesterday, watching the argument about &ldquo;Hillary: The Movie&rdquo; and free speech for this week&rsquo;s column. It was Sonia Sotomayor&rsquo;s first case as a Supreme Court Justice, so all eyes were on her. She didn&rsquo;t say much, but one thing she said struck me. The courts &ldquo;created corporations as persons,&rdquo; she said, and &ldquo;there could be an argument made that that was the Court&#39;s error to start with.&rdquo; It was a mistake, she suggested, that the Supreme Court &ldquo;imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics.&rdquo; She&rsquo;s referring to the notion that corporations have a right to free speech under the First Amendment. She appears not to agree with it. From the tone of her remarks, it seems she&rsquo;d rather they shut up. So if you are a corporation and a politician vows just before an election to ban your product, you can&rsquo;t take out ads to shoot back at him. That hardly seems fair.Here&rsquo;s the transcript. Note also Scalia&#39;s gravelly sarcasm. <div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:13:33 +0000 20024973 at Civil liberties: freedom of speech: The tongue twisters Issue:&nbsp; China, beware Fly Title:&nbsp; Civil liberties: freedom of speech Rubric:&nbsp; In the last of our series on civil liberties, we look at the difficulty of reconciling traditional freedoms of expression with the new demands of national security Location:&nbsp; IN COUNTRIES at war, freedoms of the press and of speech are often restricted. For that reason, al-Qaeda's attacks of September 11th 2001, by precipitating a “war on terror”, also raised questions—both legal and moral—about the role of the media in free societies. Several Western governments have used national security as a justification for limiting certain sorts of public information and public speech. The press itself has been torn: sometimes it has refused to accept limits on its freedom of expression (as when newspapers worldwide published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that were offensive to Muslims); sometimes it has accepted them (as when those newspapers apologised). Meanwhile, the media have managed to continue their normal work, uncovering abuses at the Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, for example. So what has happened to freedom ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:08:02 +0000 9958346 at Mosques in the West: Islam, the American way Issue:&nbsp; Who&#039;s afraid of Google? Fly Title:&nbsp; Mosques in the West Rubric:&nbsp; Why the United States is fairer to Muslims than “Eurabia” is Location:&nbsp; AFP IN PITTSBURGH, a Turkish group, pious but peaceful, decides to rethink its plans for an Islamic centre after an angry public hearing. In Clitheroe, a town in northern England, a plan to turn an ex-church into a mosque wins planning approval after seven failed bids. In Austria a far-rightist, Jörg Haider, grabs headlines by proposing that no mosques or minarets should be built in the province of Carinthia, where he is governor. In Memphis, Tennessee, Muslims manage to build a large cemetery despite local objections to their burial customs. On the face of it, there is something similar about all these vignettes of inter-faith politics in the Western world. They all illustrate the strong emotions, and opportunistic electoral games, that are surfacing in many countries as Muslim minorities, increasingly prosperous and confident, aspire to build more mosques and other communal buildings. All these stories show the way in which whipped-up fears of a ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:51:23 +0000 9724266 at Gun control SIR&nbsp;&mdash; I find it ironic that a magazine that uses it&#39;s first amendment protections to advocate and write about economic freedom would argue against the legal ownership of firearms by law abiding citizens. The right to life and liberty is only a right if it can be defended like any other right. Gun ownership is about more than hunting although this heritage is an important part of our country. It also represents freedom and responsibility and the fundamental right to defend yourself when someone wishes to violently take these rights away. While law enforcemant has a deterant role before a crime occurs and an investagatory one after it is not the function nor is it possible to shift their role to personal security without becoming an authoritarian police state. Once gun control eliminates violent crime, we can eliminate white collar crime by eliminating private accountants and lawyers and give the raw data to government auditors to crunch for us.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Charles McCabe <div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:06:06 +0000 20009959 at Holocaust denial SIR &mdash; As a both civil- and common-law trained lawyer and free-speech advocate, I highly praise your greatly articulated stance on the most recent wave of European legislation, which makes, and/or would make Holocaust denial a crime in law. A French piece of legislation, currently in effect, makes denying the Armenian genocide a crime in law, too. As repulsive, plainly historically false, such denial claims might be, and surely are, there should not be any room for &ldquo;opinion crimes&rdquo; in liberal, democratic societies, whose essence is based on the tenets of freedom of speech, assembly and religion, as embodied not only in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but also in the European Convention on Human Rights. There is, though, a sad discrepancy between the two cultural and legal systems. The American courts, pre-eminently the US Supreme Court, have historically paid broad deference to free-speech basic constitutional principle, even upholding flag-burning, objection to the Pledge of Allegiance, publication of ominous KKK, or neo-Nazi materials, on the noble assumptions that &ldquo;&hellip;[the] purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular, is to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation &ndash;and their ideas from suppression- at the hand of an intolerant society&hellip;&rdquo; (US Supreme Court, McIntyre v. Ohio ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:10:45 +0000 20004646 at Statistical modelling: The wisdom of Hercules Issue:&nbsp; The oiloholics Fly Title:&nbsp; Statistical modelling Rubric:&nbsp; Using computer models to identify important American jurisprudence Location:&nbsp; cambridge, massachusetts IN A spate of wishful thinking, an American legal philosopher, Ronald Dworkin, once invented an imaginary but ideal judge, named Hercules, who had complete knowledge of every case ever decided. Hercules saw the law as a seamless web of past precedents, and could come to one right answer to decide any particular case. Of course, no actual judge possesses such a supernatural reasoning ability. Recently, though, scholars have built electronic maps of legal precedents that offer at least some semblance of the Herculean panorama of law. One such map, of the network of links between United States Supreme Court cases, has been devised by Seth Chandler, professor of law at the University of Houston. Mr Chandler obtained some 26,000 opinions issued by the Supreme Court between the early 19th century and the present day. He treated each of these cases as a node and each citation from one case to another as a link. The result was a ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:00:48 +0000 4316174 at AIDS: Prostitution v constitution Issue:&nbsp; Germany&#039;s surprising economy Fly Title:&nbsp; AIDS Rubric:&nbsp; A challenge to America&#039;s anti-AIDS policy Location:&nbsp; SINCE it was announced in 2003, PEPFAR, America's $15-billion aid package to help fight AIDS abroad, has stirred up a storm over its socially conservative stance on such issues as sexual abstinence and condoms. The latest controversy is over commercial sex work, as prostitution is delicately known in the AIDS-prevention community. DKT International, a social-marketing organisation that supplies condoms and other family-planning goods in the developing world, has sued USAID, America's foreign assistance agency, for requiring it to sign an “anti-prostitution pledge” in order to receive funds. DKT regards this restriction as not only detrimental to the global fight against the disease, but also a violation of its constitutional right to free speech. According to the congressional legislation that covers PEPFAR, government funds may not be spent on activities that promote or advocate the legalisation or practice of prostitution and sex trafficking. Nor may this money be used ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:47:46 +0000 4292608 at Church and state: Go down, Moses? Issue:&nbsp; Democracy stirs in the Middle East Fly Title:&nbsp; Church and state Rubric:&nbsp; The Supreme Court gets to grips with the Ten Commandments Location:&nbsp; washington, dc APA suspiciously prominent position HIS law licence was suspended for failing to do work for which he had been paid. With no office to work from, he has to do his research in libraries, and he lives in a tent in a woodsy bit of Austin. Yet none of this has stopped Thomas Van Orden, the “homeless lawyer”, from arguing his case against the state of Texas all the way to the highest court in the land. Mr Van Orden, on his daily strolls in the grounds of the Texas capitol, became perturbed by a six-foot-high red-granite monument of the Ten Commandments that sits between the statehouse and the state Supreme Court. It was, it seemed to him, a clear violation of the constitution. So he sued. He argued his case before the federal district court and appeals court, losing both times. But on March 2nd the Supreme Court heard his appeal, along with another involving framed copies of the Ten Commandments removed from two Kentucky courthouses. ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 03 Mar 2005 11:54:46 +0000 3723542 at Freedom of speech: Hollywood and the hacker Issue:&nbsp; The electric revolution Fly Title:&nbsp; Freedom of speech Rubric:&nbsp; Location:&nbsp; IN ONE of the more chilling scenes of George Orwell&#39;s “1984”, the citizens of Oceania gather in a cinema to denounce Emmanuel Goldstein, a political dissident, as “the Enemy of the People”. In New York, for the past two weeks, a team of Hollywood lawyers have been doing much the same to Emmanuel Goldstein, an Internet journalist. Mr Goldstein, who was born Eric Corley, is the editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He posted on his newsletter&#39;s website a code known as DeCSS. This code undoes the encryption technologies that protect a digital video disc from being copied. The Hollywood studios are therefore accusing Mr Goldstein of helping to pirate their films, their copyrighted intellectual property. He says he is upholding freedom of expression. The DeCSS code has already had a brush with the law in Europe. Earlier this year, Norwegian police raided the house of one of DeCSS&#39;s creators, a 16-year-old called Jon Johansen, and confiscated his computer equipment. And Hollywood&#39;s case looks solid: a ...<div class="og_rss_groups"></div> Thu, 03 Aug 2000 00:00:00 +0000 28300 at