Category: Supreme Court Decisions

Hayburn’s Case, 2 U.S. 409 (1792) is one of the earliest decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized the creation of the Court, the justices did not consider their first case until 1792. Hayburn's case pre...

In Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court held that Texas’ specialty license plate designs constitute government speech. Accordingly, Texas was entitled to refuse to issue a confederate flag license pla...

By a vote of 5-4 in Obergefell v. Hodges, the United States Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when...

In March of 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise - a federal statute that regulated slavery in several western territories of the country - in the infamous Dred Scott Decision, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). ...

In Zivotofsky v. Kerry, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the power to recognize foreign states and governments is exclusive to the President. The 6-3 decision, which rested almost exclusively on the Constitution’s separation of powers, highlights t...

In Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824), the U.S. Supreme Court first held that Congress has the authority to regulate any form of commerce that crosses state lines. The opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, is considered the most influenti...

In McCulloch v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress has broad discretionary authority to implement the powers enumerated in the Constitution under the Necessary and Proper Clause. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819) is reg...

While many were hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court would address whether existing precedent that excludes threatening speech from First Amendment protection applies to online speech, the justices elected to resolve Elonis v. United States on purely s...

In Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810), the Marshall Court ruled that an act of the Georgia State legislature that nullified a prior land grant they passed violated the U.S. Constitution. It was the first case in which the U. S. Supreme Court held...