thomas’ core argument is that the court’s holding assumes that first amendment protections apply to speech directed at minors, which thomas thinks is WRONG WRONG WRONG.... he explains his theories of constitutional interpretation, which he supports by citing his own opinion in a previous case, an opinion that not a single other justice joined! in case that citation was insufficient, he then… cites another opinion of his that no other justice joined!.... this is a BOLD move.

but all of this is just a warmup. we are still getting to the fabulous part. this is the part when thomas starts talking about what thomas jefferson believed about raising his children. and thomas is talking about this because, in his mind, we have to use exactly the interpretation of constitutional language that the founders did—which means we have to imagine exactly what they would have thought, looking at the historic record to guide us. and so thomas, with scrupulous attention to every detail of jefferson’s parenting practices, totally fails to mention any of jefferson’s children except the white ones he had with his wife.

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16. Snyder v. Phelps: "Does the First Amendment protect protesters at a funeral from liability for intentionally inflicting emotional distress on the family of the deceased?"

15. General Dynamics Corp. v. United States: "Whether the government can maintain its claim against a party when it invokes the state-secrets privilege to completely deny that party a defense to the claim."

14. Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, Inc.: "Whether Exemption 7(C) of the Freedom of Information Act – which exempts from mandatory disclosure records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes when such disclosure could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of 'personal privacy' – protects the 'privacy' of corporate entities."

13. Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants: "Does a state law restricting the sale of violent video games to minors violate the First Amendment right to free speech?"

12. Sykes v. United States: "Whether using a vehicle while knowingly or intentionally fleeing from a law enforcement officer after being ordered to stop constitutes a 'violent felony' under the Armed Career Criminal Act"

11. Staub v. Proctor Hospital: "Can an employer be found liable for the discriminatory acts of supervisors, who do not themselves make employment decisions but do influence the employment decision-makers?"

10. Cullen v. Pinholster: "Whether a federal court can overturn a state criminal conviction on the basis of facts the defendant could have alleged, but did not, in state court."

9. Bruesewitz v. Wyeth: "The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act protects vaccine manufacturers from liability for certain injuries caused by their vaccines (giving injured patients compensation from the government instead). Does that immunity apply when the victim claims that the design of the drug created an avoidable and unnecessary risk to patients?"

8. Michigan v. Bryant: "The Sixth Amendment generally requires prosecutors to present testimonial evidence through live testimony at trial. Do statements made by a wounded crime victim to police officers about the perpetrator constitute such testimonial evidence, or can the police officer testify at trial about what the victim said?"

7. Kentucky v. King: "Under what circumstances can lawful police action impermissibly 'create' exigent circumstances that preclude warrantless entry?"

6. Premo v. Moore: "When a defendant has pleaded guilty, but later challenges his conviction on the ground that his lawyer should have moved to suppress his confession, is he entitled to habeas relief upon showing that his confession was coerced?"

5.

4. Pepper v. United States: "May a court consider a defendant's post-sentencing rehabilitation as a ground for reducing his sentence below the federal sentencing guideline range? When a sentence is vacated on appeal, and a new judge is assigned on remand, must the new judge follow the prior district judge's sentencing findings?"

3. Virginia Office for Protection and Advocacy v. Stewart: "Does the Eleventh Amendment prohibit an independent state agency established to protect individuals with disabilities from suing state officials in federal court to obtain a court order requiring the officials to comply with federal law?"

2. Skinner v. Switzer: "When a convicted prisoner wishes to sue a state to obtain access to biological evidence for DNA testing, is he required to file a habeas petition or can he file a civil rights suit instead?"

1. Connick v. Thompson: "Can a prosecutor's office be held liable for the illegal conduct of one of its prosecutors, on the theory that the office failed to adequately train its employees, when there has been only one violation resulting from that deficient training?"

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is passionate about the law. And "Mad Men."

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The notion that a right of self-defense implies an auxiliary right to own a certain type of firearm presupposes not only controversial judgments about the strength and scope of the (posited) self-defense right, but also controversial assumptions about the likely effects of making that type of firearm more broadly available. It is a very long way from the proposition that the Four­teenth Amendment protects a basic individual right of self-defense to the conclusion that a city may not ban handguns....

[F]irearms have a fundamentally ambivalent rela­tionship to liberty. Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders, they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims. The threat that firearms will be misused is far from hypothetical, for gun crime has devastated many of our communities. Amici calculate that approximately one million Americans have been wounded or killed by gunfire in the last decade. Urban areas such as Chicago suffer disproportionately from this epidemic of violence. Hand­ guns contribute disproportionately to it. Just as some homeowners may prefer handguns because of their small size, light weight, and ease of operation, some criminals will value them for the same reasons. ....

Hence, in evaluating an asserted right to be free from particular gun-control regulations, liberty is on both sides of the equation. Guns may be useful for self-defense, as well as for hunting and sport, but they also have a unique potential to facilitate death and destruction and thereby to destabilize ordered liberty. Your interest in keeping and bearing a certain firearm may diminish my interest in being and feeling safe from armed violence. And while granting you the right to own a handgun might make you safer on any given day-assuming the handgun's marginal contribution to self-defense outweighs its marginal contri­bution to the risk of accident, suicide, and criminal mis­chief-it may make you and the community you live in less safe overall, owing to the increased number of hand­ guns in circulation. It is at least reasonable for a democ­ratically elected legislature to take such concerns into account in considering what sorts of regulations would best serve the public welfare.

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A federal district judge granted an injunction to the anti-gay marriage creeps.

The state appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit agreed the petitions should be released.

The anti-gay marriage creeps appealed to the Supreme Court.

This led into an interesting area! Is petition-signing speech? If it is, what is it saying?

In most cases, the individual's signature will express the view that the law subject to the petition should be overturned. Even if the signer is agnostic as to the merits of the underlying law, his signature still ex- presses the political view that the question should be considered "by the whole electorate." Meyer v. Grant, 486 U. S. 414, 421. In either case, the expression of a political view implicates a First Amendment right.

(That is from the syllabus, not the decision.) And:

According to plaintiffs, the objective of those seeking disclosure is not to prevent fraud, but to publicly identify signatories and broadcast their political views on the subject of the petition. Plaintiffs allege, for example, that several groups plan to post the petitions in searchable form on the Internet, and then encourage other citizens to seek out R-71 petition signers. That, plaintiffs argue, would subject them to threats, harassment, and reprisals.

And yet, the decision was 8 to 1 in favor of releasing the petitions. (In part because it sounds like the anti-gay marriage creeps did some bad arguing.)

But that brave "1" was Clarence Thomas.

He rejects the arguments that secret petitions should be available to the people. "We should not abandon those principles merely because Washington and its amici can point to a mere eight instances of initiative-related fraud." A mere eight instances! You need at least 17 instances of fraudulent signatures to make the case, I guess.

THEN he calls that whole section irrelevant (he was just bringing it up for fun) and then he goes on for a while about how Washington State should make petition-signers public but do it by not making them at all public! The idea is they "could put the names and addresses of referendum signers into a similar electronic database that state employees could search without subjecting the name and address of each signer to wholesale public disclosure." So, actually, still secret.

AND THEN. He concludes that there is a right to privacy in signing a petition for a ballot measure. He says the Court's "conclusion rests on the premise that some referendum measures are so benign that the fact of public disclosure will not chill protected First Amendment activity." So, to not have secret petitions is chilling to speech.

And in the end, his historical example, maddeningly, of the sorts of people who would need privacy for their First Amendment activity of signing a petition? Lady suffragettes.

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