Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Marbury v. Madison

• 1803, Judicial Review & Federalism

• ”It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each.” - Chief Justice - John Marshall

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Dred Scott v. Sanford

• 1857, Slavery, Due Process, Citizenship

• " . . . We think they [people of African ancestry] are . . . not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. . . ." — Chief Justice Roger B. Taney

Landmark Supreme Court Cases• Plessy v. Ferguson

• 1896, Separate but Equal, Equal Protection

• "The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." —Justice Henry Billings Brown

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Brown v. Board of Education

• 1954, End Segregation, Equal Protection

• "We conclude that the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." —Chief Justice Earl Warren

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Gideon v. Wainwright

• 1963, Right to Counsel, Due Process

• The Court concluded that the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a right to counsel was fundamental and essential to a fair trial in both state and federal criminal justice systems.  In all felony criminal cases, states must provide lawyers for indigent defendants.

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Miranda v. Arizona

• 1966, Self Incrimination, Due Process

• ". . . the prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination." —Chief Justice Earl Warren

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Tinker v. Des Moines

• 1969, Student Speech, Symbolic Speech

• ". . . In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views." — Justice Abe Fortas

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• Roe v. Wade

• 1973, Abortion, Right to Privacy

• The majority determined that a woman’s right to decide whether to have an abortion involved the question of whether the Constitution protected a right to privacy.  Further, after considerable discussion of the law’s historical lack of recognition of rights of a fetus, the justices concluded “the word ‘person’, as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

Landmark Supreme Court Cases

• New Jersey v. TLO

• 1985, Student Search & Seizure

• "The legality of a search of a student should depend simply on the reasonableness, under all the circumstances, of the search . . . Such a search will be permissible in its scope when the measures adopted are reasonably related to the objectives of the search and not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction. " —Justice Byron White

Landmark Supreme Court Cases• Citizens United v. FEC

• 2010, Campaign Contributions, Political Speech, Corporate Citizenship

• The majority argued that the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money unconstitutionally limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.