Gaia Grosz
AP Gov Summer Assignment
8/19/19
Roe v. Wade
The SCOTUS case of Roe v. Wade began in 1970 when Jane Roe, a fictional name for protection purposes, filed a lawsuit against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas. Roe challenged the state of Texas on the law that abortion is illegal. She believed the current laws on abortion at the time were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court declared that in the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, citizens are given the right to privacy including a woman’s right to an abortion and to do what she pleases with her body. Justice Harry Blackmun the court’s disposition, which had a 7-2 majority. He decided in favor of Roe which recognized that a woman’s choice whether to have an abortion is protected by her right to privacy. Blackmun also stated that during the first trimester, a woman’s right to privacy surrounding the choice to have an abortion outweighed a state’s interests in regulating this decision. This case was first heard by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas when Roe filed the lawsuit against Wade claiming the Texas law on abortion violated the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. This case mostly relates to the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment which ensures citizens to have a right to privacy and reproductive rights fall under that category. Abortion will happen whether or not it is illegal, but the legalization of abortion guarantees women to safely get an abortion. It is a right of privacy that all women should have and be able to decide what they want for their own body. Today President Trump and several other Republican leaders are trying to outlaw abortion.
Brown v. Board of Education
The case of Brown v. BOE was the integration of court cases in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Washington D.C, and Virginia. The repeating issues of these different cases were the segregation of public schools. School segregation was justified by claiming schools are “separate but equal.” However a year later the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) filed a lawsuit against the BOE and the Supreme Court chose to take the case to determine if separate was actually equal. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public facilities would be legal in the United States in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson. Plessy, an African-American man refused to sit on the train car for African-American passengers. It took 55 years for segregation to be challenged at the level of the Supreme Court again. In 1951, Oliver Brown filed a lawsuit against the BOE of Topeka, Kansas when his daughter, Linda Brown could not attend the all-white elementary school there. Brown thought that segregating schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The case was first heard of by the Topeka district court where segregation in schools was upheld due to the court being in a conservative Jim Crow area with a conservative jury. Jim Crow was a set of racist laws that prevented things like mixed racial schools and mixed-race water fountains. Eventually, the NAACP heard of this case and several others like it and filed a lawsuit to the Supreme Court. These five cases all fall under the name of Brown vs. BOE. The Court's decision was unanimous, they found that separate was not equal and was a violation of the 14th Amendment. The amendment means that the states cannot make laws restricting the rights of American-born citizens. The case made national headlines as the liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that segregation was soon to be outlawed in schools. The amendment that relates closest to this case would be the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause in that amendment. The amendment states that the government cannot pass laws restricting the rights of American born citizens. The segregation in schools was violating this because the all-white schools were given better resources and better education than the African-American schools. This case relates to today’s society because of the racial demographics in some schools. Areas that previously used the Jim Crow laws still have mostly all-white schools and mostly all-black schools, they were never fully equally distributed.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
Right before the 2008 presidential election, Citizens United, a conservative corporation, wanted to release a documentary that was negatively portraying Hillary Clinton. They were previously aware that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) would claim that the film is against Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, this prohibits corporations from funding propaganda against political parties. They argued at the District Courts that it shouldn't be prevented from being released to the public. The District Courts ruled against Citizens United v. FEC, so they then appealed to the Supreme Court. On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court decided that the case that it is within the First Amendment, particularly the freedom of speech rights to use funds for political campaigning and advertising. Chief Justice John Roberts voted with a majority of 5-4. This case relates most closely to the First Amendment because even though citizen are giving the freedom of speech it is still sometimes considered controversial when people express their unpopular opinions.
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