The Moving Image and Sound Branch of the National Archives doesn’t just hold motion pictures.  It’s also home to over 300,000 sound recordings, including those from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court began recording its proceedings in 1955, but the court’s opinions were not recorded until the 1980s.  The recordings are organized chronologically.  Since cases are often argued over multiple days, cases can be split up between different recordings. Some newly digitized landmark cases include: Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 required states to Read More

"Not White Enough is a legal and political history of anti-Asian bigotry, beginning with the California Gold Rush and ending with the infamous Supreme Court decision that upheld the imprisonment without trial of more than 100,000 innocent Americans on the spurious grounds of national security. The book demonstrates how law and politics bled into each other for decades to enable two-tiered justice, brushing aside Constitutional guarantees of equality under law. Not White Enough examines each of the key Supreme Court decisions-Wong Kim Ark, Ozawa, and Thind, for example-as expressions of political will and not simply jurisprudence. The author chronicles the political history of racism that made Japanese internment almost inevitable, including the key role San Francisco mayors James D. Phelan and Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, and California attorney general Ulysses Webb played in instigating, for political convenience, some of the most egregious anti-Asian legislation"--

"In Supreme Bias, Christina L. Boyd, Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand, present for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of race and gender at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings held before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Drawing on their deep knowledge of the confirmation hearings, as well as rich new qualitative and quantitative evidence, the authors highlight how the women and people of color who have sat before the Committee have faced a significantly different confirmation process than their white, male colleagues. Despite being among the most qualified and well-credentialed lawyers of their respective generations, female nominees and nominees of color face more skepticism of their professional competence, are subjected to stereotype-based questioning, and are more frequently interrupted and described in less positive terms by senators. In addition to revealing the disturbing extent to which race and gender bias exists even at the highest echelon of U.S. legal power, this book also provides concrete suggestions for how that bias can be reduced in the future"--

"This edited volume brings together expert legal scholars to identify and critique jurisprudential themes running through Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinions during her tenure as a jurist, including opinions relating to gender equality, voting rights, copyright law, civil and criminal procedure, immigration law, environmental law, bankruptcy, and more"--

With unparalleled access to key players, a CNN senior legal analyst and Supreme Court expert provides an urgent and inside look at the history-making era of the Supreme Court during the Trump and post-Trump years, including its reversal of Roe v. Wade.;"Nine Black Robes displays the inner maneuverings among the Supreme Court justices that led to the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade and a half century of women's abortion rights. Biskupic details how rights are stripped away or, alternatively as in the case of gun owners, how rights are expanded. Today's bench--with its conservative majority--is desperately ideological. The Court has been headed rightward and ensnared by its own intrigues for years, but the Trump appointments hastened the modern transformation. With unparalleled access to key players, Biskupic shows the tactics of each justice and reveals switched votes and internal pacts that typically never make the light of day, yet will have repercussions for generations to come"--

Barbara Atwood, a professor emerita of law and an expert on the act, discusses the history of the law and the arguments in the case.

Colleges across the country will be forced to stop considering race in admissions under Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling, ending affirmative action policies that date back decades.

This article was updated on June 29 at 4:09 p.m.In a historic decision, the Supreme Court severely limited, if not effectively ended, the use of affirmative action in college admissions on Thursday.

The Supreme Court killed affirmative action, but not for military academies or the legacy admissions that protect the ruling class.

By a narrow margin, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Navajo Nation in a case over water rights in the drought-stricken US Southwest.

"Every Supreme Court transition presents an opportunity for a shift in the balance of the third branch of American government, but the replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas in 1991 proved particularly momentous. Not only did it shift the ideological balance on the Court; it was inextricably entangled with the persistent American dilemma of race. In The Transition, this most significant transition from 1953 to the present is explored through the lives and writings of the first two African American justices on Court, touching on the lasting consequences for understandings of American citizenship as well as the central currents of Black political thought over the past century. In their lives, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas experienced the challenge of living and learning in a world that had enslaved their relatives and that continued to subjugate members of their racial group. On the Court, their judicial writings--often in concurrences or dissents--richly illustrate the ways in which these two individuals embodied these crucial American (and African American) debates--on the balance between state and federal authority, on the government's responsibility to protect its citizens against discrimination, and on the best strategies for pursuing equality. The gap between Justices Marshall and Thomas on these questions cannot be overstated, and it reveals an extraordinary range of thought that has yet to be fully appreciated. The 1991 transition from Justice Marshall to Justice Thomas has had consequences that are still unfolding at the Court and in society. Arguing that the importance of this transition has been obscured by the relegation of these Justices to the sidelines of Supreme Court history, Daniel Kiel shows that it is their unique perspective as Black justices--the lives they have lived as African Americans and the rooting of their judicial philosophies in the relationship of government to African Americans--that makes this succession echo across generations"--

Fearless, adversarial journalism that holds the powerful accountable.

"By re-writing US Supreme Court opinions that implicate critical dimensions of racial justice, Critical Race Judgments demonstrates that it's possible to be judge and a critical race theorist. Specific issues covered in these cases include the death penalty, employment, voting, policing, education, the environment, justice, housing, immigration, sexual orientation, segregation, and mass incarceration. While some rewritten cases {u2013} Plessy v. Ferguson (which constitutionalized Jim Crow) and Korematsu v. United States (which constitutionalized internment) {u2013} originally focused on race, many of the rewritten opinions {u2013} Lawrence v. Texas (which constitutionalized sodomy laws) and Roe v. Wade (which constitutionalized a woman's right to choose) {u2013} are used to incorporate racial justice principles in novel and important ways. This work is essential for everyone who needs to understand why critical race theory must be deployed in constitutional law to uphold and advance racial justice principles that are foundational to US democracy."-- from publisher's website.

The Term is a podcast from Law360 for the busy U.S. Supreme Court watcher. Give us about 15 minutes each week and we'll catch you up on all the big action at the nation's highest court, along with a list of what to watch in the coming sessions. Hosts senior Supreme Court reporter Jimmy Hoover in Washington, D.C. and editor-at-large Natalie Rodriguez in New York City cut through a busy docket to focus on the key cases and developments everyone will be talking about.

The Supreme Court rulings on DACA and asylum seekers, the temporary suspension of work visas and the Muslim ban are all part of the tumultuous cycle of 'breaking news' about US immigration policy. But beyond the headlines there are quieter, more personal stories of the immigrant American experience that podcasts are custom made to tell. Check out these six podcast episodes that explore the topicwith depth, nuance, and even a little humor. Subtitle 'In quarantine with Joe Wong' Joe Wong is a brilliant bilingual comedian. In the US, he does stand-up. In his native China he hosts a popular TV

Listen to Supreme Court Of The United States with 228 episodes, free! No signup or install needed. New York v. New Jersey, No. 22O156 [Arg: 3.1.2023]. Department of Education v. Brown, No. 22-535 [Arg: 2.28.2023].

"The U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear eight separate cases that had presented opportunities to reconsider its doctrine of qualified immunity. That doctrine created by the Supreme Court in 1982 holds that government officials can be held accountable for violating the Constitution only if they violate a clearly established constitutional rule. In practice that means that government officials can only be held liable if a federal court of appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court has already held that someone violated the Constitution by engaging in precisely the same conduct under precisely the same circumstances."

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A podcast about the United States Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.

‎News · 2023

An unscheduled, unpredictable Supreme Court podcast. Hosted by Will Baude and Dan Epps.

Welcome to Dissenting Opinions, a new podcast by the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School. Hosted by Will Baude, each episode will have top legal minds discuss a Supreme Court case they believe is misunderstood -- with special episodes of a "deep dive" into a legal topic.

Dissents have it all: brilliant writing, surprising reasoning, shade, puns, and sometimes historical impact. Although the “losing side” writes them, they’re still important: they can provide a roadmap for future challenges or persuade other justices. Sometimes they’re just cathartic. In Dissed, attorneys Anastasia Boden and Elizabeth Slattery dig deep into important dissents, both past, and present, and reveal the stories behind them.

‎Government · 2023

‎Government · 2023

A series about how the Supreme Court got so supreme.

"The 21st Century law enforcement officer serves a variety of public service functions only some of which involve the enforcement of criminal laws. From some of those non-criminal public service roles the courts have recognized the community caretaking doctrine to authorize some limited stops and searches by officers that may not be related to criminal enforcement duties."

"An armed robber walks into seven stores in Indiana and Michigan during a three-week crime spree in October 2017. Investigators get from the robber's phone carrier real-time cell site location information (CSLI) that show his phone's pings to nearby cell towers which help the investigators geolocate their suspect. The robber gets arrested and charged in federal court with five counts of robbery and several accompanying weapons charges. And the rest of the world gets an opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on one of the many questions that the Supreme Court left open when it decided its seminal privacy-related opinion Carpenter v. United States 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018)."

"U.S. Supreme Court justices returned to the contentious issue of police powers on Wednesday as they grappled with whether to make it easier for officers to enter a home without a warrant for reasons of health or public safety in a case involving the confiscation of a Rhode Island man's guns."