In the case of Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court on Wednesday could decide the fate of a key section of the Voting Rights Act, a centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement. Here is a recap of the major events and cases related to the act.

In September 2025, John Roberts Jr. will mark the 20th anniversary of his confirmation as Chief Justice of the United States. Roberts and his conservative colleagues on the court thus far have etched legacies in a number of areas of the law, but only one has major implications for democracy’s future.

Writing that it “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination,” Louisiana on Wednesday told the Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais to leave in place […]

Historical Background The history of capital punishment in the United States reflects a cycle of reform, reinstatement, and continued controversy. In 1972, the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman ...

"Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has enabled mass incarceration through rulings that violate constitutional curbs on pretrial detention, coercive plea bargaining, excessive sentences, and other forms of state overreach. Detailing their flaws, Rachel Barkow argues that a Court committed to constitutional rights must overturn these precedents"-- Provided by publisher.

When forces unite with no care for the Constitution, the rule of law or anything you learned in civics class, you can end up with the entrenched overreach of the Plenary Power Doctrine.

The president's contention that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional is considered a fringe view because the Supreme Court ruled to the contrary 127 years ago.

"In her work as an appellate judge, Justice Ginsburg translated this devotion into a jurisprudence focused on 'We the People,' substantively and procedurally. Substantively, Justice Ginsburg insisted that faithfully employed, the words of the Constitution supported an expansive understanding of who was included in 'We the People,' despite the framers' narrow understanding of the phrase when it appeared in the preamble to the Constitution. Expressed also as a jurisprudence of equality and opportunity, Justice Ginsburg believed that the phrase promised equal dignity for people despite their gender, gender identity, race, or disability. Procedurally, 'We the People' shaped Justice Ginsburg's approach to the process of deciding cases, guiding every step of her judicial process-the way she read the Constitution and statutes, approached voting issues, and analyzed the demands of the separation of powers, for example. While the substantive contours of 'We the People' have received the most attention, the full sweep of her jurisprudence appears also in the process she used in analyzing all issues. Justice Ginsburg's jurisprudence of 'We the People' became the ordering principle of this book, explaining both the book's title and its topics. Instead of a general survey of Justice Ginsburg's work, the book tells the story of an advocate and a jurist committed to increasing in material ways the bundle of rights we all carry around with us as Americans. As Linda Greenhouse explained in the Foreword, the story begins with Justice Ginsburg's commitment to an America that enables people with diverse experiences to live together in civic harmony. Justice Ginsburg believed that because the American experience involved living in community, the religious expression of some of us had to yield when the expression oppressed others of us in ways endangering that harmony"--

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.

"The standard public debate over the Fourteenth Amendment goes something like this. Critics of the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment over the last several decades believe that the Court has used the Amendment's provisions for "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws" as open-ended vehicles for judicial policymaking, whether on abortion or gay marriage or a host of other issues. Indeed, it is difficult for someone sympathetic to the result in the 2015 gay marriage case Obergefell v. Hodges to read the Court's opinion and get the feeling that what the Court is doing is law. The case was decided under the rather nebulous concept "substantive due process," the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment's injunction that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law is not merely about process as its terms might suggest, but also about "substance"--Namely, that the clause protects unwritten, unenumerated fundamental rights or prohibits arbitrary and oppressive legislation"--