Trial

Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision issued in 1973 by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of the constitutionality of laws that criminalized or restricted access to abortions. The Court ruled 7–2 that a right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman’s decision to have anRead More →

The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in anyRead More →

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court that settled a recount dispute in Florida’s 2000 presidential election. The ruling was issued on December 12, 2000. On December 9, the Court had preliminarily halted the Florida recount that was occurring. Eight days earlier, the Court unanimously decided the closely related caseRead More →

Lemon v. Kurtzman was a case argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. The court ruled in an 8–1 decision that Pennsylvania’s Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act (represented through David Kurtzman) from 1968 was unconstitutional, violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The act allowed theRead More →

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), was a landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority in a 5–4 decision and joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg,Read More →

The Nuremberg Trials (German: Die Nürnberger Prozesse) were a series of military tribunals held by the Allied forces under international law and the laws of war after World War II. The trials were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership ofRead More →

Hollingsworth v. Perry refers to a series of United States federal court cases that legalized same-sex marriage in the State of California. The case began in 2009 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which found that banning same-sex marriage violates equal protection under the law.Read More →

(Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) is a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The case was brought by Mildred Loving (née Jeter), a woman of color, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a yearRead More →

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. It upheld affirmative action, allowing race to be one of several factors in college admission policy. However, the court ruled that specific racial quotas, such asRead More →

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), also known as the Dred Scott case, was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on US labor law and constitutional law. It held that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves”,Read More →

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as “separate butRead More →

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision effectively overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, whichRead More →

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), is a landmark case by the United States Supreme Court which forms the basis for the exercise of judicial review in the United States under Article III of the Constitution. The landmark decision helped define the boundary between the constitutionally separateRead More →