Although the legal institution of slavery was dismantled by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, discrimination on the basis of race and racially motivated violence continued unabated.

Currently, forty jurisdictions (thirty-eight states, the federal government, and the military) authorize capital punishment.

Sometimes a defendant facing the death penalty once will have to undergo another trial for the same capital offense and face the death penalty again.

Race detrimentally affects the administration of capital punishment in the United States.

Capital punishment is a punishment option of the federal government in more than two thirds of states in the United States.

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe proselytizing is an essential part of their faith and, therefore, a religious obligation.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, many colleges and universities responded to incidents of racial and sexual harassment by adopting campus hate speech codes.

A California politician once famously observed: ‘‘Money is the Mother’s Milk of Politics.’’ For at least a century, the Congress has tried to legislate against this dictum.

The phrase ‘‘cameras in the courtroom’’ refers to the presence of news media cameras, both still and television cameras, inside courtrooms recording trial proceedings for the public. 

The Fourth Amendment’s requirement that the government obtain a warrant before any search or seizure of private property is well established for criminal investigations.

In Trombetta, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause does not require the government to preserve evidence that could potentially be useful to a criminal defendant.

People who disagree about something can be induced to set aside their disagreement to unite against a common enemy.

When a commercial activity requires a license or permit from a government, can a state use this authority to regulate ‘‘expression’’ even if aspects of the conduct do not meet the Roth standard of obscenity?

In California v. Greenwood, the police searched a defendant’s garbage bags left on the curb.

The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches generally requires law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before initiating a search.

John C. Calhoun received an elite education, studying under a prominent reverend tutor, and then graduating from Yale College. After his admission to the South Carolina bar, Calhoun was elected to the South Carolina legislature.

Federal and state laws authorize the government to seize and forfeit property that is ‘‘tainted’’ by its connection to specified crimes.

The Connecticut legislature enacted a resolution granting a new hearing in a probate trial.

In a per curium decision, based on Redrup v. New York (1967), the Supreme Court disposed of Cain v. Kentucky and reversed Kentucky’s ban of public showings of the film ‘‘I, A Woman.’’

Cable television regulation began in the late 1940s and 1950s primarily as a local matter. The first cable systems needed easements to construct facilities on public and private land.

The judgment rendered concerns the issue of whether the film Natural Born Killers is protected speech under the First Amendment, that is, should movie producers, directors, and studios be responsible for encouraging criminal behavior?

Pierce Butler, one of the most conservative justices ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, was born March 17, 1866, in a log cabin on a Minnesota farm.

When the Supreme Court decides a case in a way that alters the constitutional rights available to a criminal defendant, can prisoners who have already completed their appeals benefit from that case through a petition for a writ of habeas corpus?

Harold Hitz Burton, mayor of Cleveland, senator from Ohio and associate justice to the U.S. Supreme Court was born on June 22, 1888, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.