Landmark Supreme Court Decision Maker

1. Should federal courts be able to declare congressional legislative and executive acts unconstitutional?

2. Does Congress have the implied powers (for example, to establish a national bank), even though those powers are not explicitly granted by the Constitution?

3. Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. Later, he resided in Illinois where slavery was prohibited. After returning to Missouri, Scott filed suit for his freedom, claiming that his residence in free territory made him a free man. Scott's master maintained that no Negro or descendant of slaves could be a US citizen with protected rights.
Was Dred Scott a free man or slave?

4. Louisiana enacted the Separate Car Act, which required separate railway cars for blacks and whites.
Does the Separate Car Act violate the Constitution?

5. In response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, the U.S. government decided to require Japanese-Americans to move into relocation camps as a matter of national security.
Did the President and Congress go beyond their war powers by implementing exclusion and restricting the rights of Americans of Japanese descent?

6. African American students had been denied admittance to certain public schools based on laws allowing public education to be segregated by race.
Does the segregation of public education based solely on race violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

7. In the 1960s, the New York Times published an ad for contributing donations to defend Martin Luther King, Jr. The ad contained several minor factual inaccuracies, which a local official felt were libelous, so he sued the Times.
Did Alabama's libel law unconstitutionally infringe on the First Amendment's freedom of speech and freedom of press protections?

8. Dollree Mapp was convicted of possessing obscene materials after an admittedly illegal police search of her home for a fugitive. She appealed her conviction on the basis of freedom of expression.
Were the confiscated materials protected by the First Amendment?

9. Does the reading of a nondenominational prayer at the start of the school day violate the "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment?

10. Clarence Earl Gideon was charged in Florida state court with felony breaking and entering. When he appeared in court without a lawyer, Gideon requested that the court appoint one for him. According to Florida state law, however, an attorney may only be appointed to an indigent defendant in capital cases, so the trial court did not appoint one.
Does the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel in criminal cases extend to felony defendants in state courts?

11. Ernesto Miranda was arrested. At the police station he was questioned about a kidnapping and rape. After a two hours interrogation, the police obtained a written confession from Miranda. The confession was admitted into evidence at his trial.
Does the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination extend to the police interrogation of a suspect?

12. Did Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, criminalizing interracial marriage, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

13. Terry and two other men were observed by a plain clothes policeman in what the officer believed to be "casing a job, a stick-up." The officer stopped and frisked the three men, and found weapons on two of them. Terry was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon and sentenced to three years in jail.
Was the search and seizure of Terry and the other men in violation of the Fourth Amendment?

14. A group of students' plan a public showing of their support for a truce in the Vietnam War. They decided to wear black armbands, as a form of symbolic protest. Aware of this, the principal created a new policy that wearing an armband would result in suspension.
Does a school's prohibition against the wearing of armbands in public school violate the students' freedom of speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment?

15. Roe, a Texas resident, sought to terminate her pregnancy by abortion. Texas law prohibited abortions except to save the pregnant woman's life.
Does the Constitution embrace a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy by abortion?

16. Nine high school and junior high school students in Columbus, Ohio, were given 10-day suspensions from school. The school principals did not hold hearings for the affected students before ordering the suspensions, and Ohio law did not require them to do so.
Did the imposition of the suspensions without preliminary hearings violate the students' Due Process rights?

17. Is the American President's right to safeguard certain information, using his "executive privilege" confidentiality power, entirely immune from judicial review?

18. T.L.O. was a high school student. School officials searched her purse suspecting she had cigarettes. The officials discovered cigarettes and a small amount of marijuana. T.L.O. was charged with possession of marijuana.
Does the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches apply to searches conducted by school officials in public schools?

19. At a school assembly of approximately 600 high school students, Matthew Fraser made a speech nominating a fellow student for elective office. In his speech, Fraser used what some observers believed was a graphic sexual metaphor to promote the candidacy of his friend. Fraser was suspended from school for two days.
Does the Constitution prevent a school district from disciplining a high school student for giving a lewd speech at a high school assembly?

20. The Student Activities Drug Testing Policy adopted by the Tecumseh, Oklahoma School District requires all middle and high school students to consent to urinalysis testing for drugs in order to participate in any extracurricular activity.
Is the school's drug testing policy constitutional?

21. Responding to a reported weapons disturbance in a private residence, Houston police entered John Lawrence's apartment and saw him and another adult man, Tyron Garner, engaging in a private, consensual sexual act.
Do the criminal convictions of Lawrence and Garner under the Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law, which criminalizes sexual intimacy by same-sex couples, but not identical behavior by different-sex couples, violate the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of laws?

22. Do the provisions of the District of Columbia Code that restrict the licensing of handguns and require licensed firearms kept in the home to be kept nonfunctional violate the Second Amendment?

23. The makers of the anti-Hillary Clinton film, "Hillary: The Movie" argued against the application of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) to their movie. In an attempt to regulate "big money" campaign contributions, the BCRA applies a variety of restrictions to "electioneering communications."
Do the BCRA's corporate financial disclosure requirements impose an unconstitutional burden?

24. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require 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 that was legally licensed and performed in another state?

25. Does the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines the term "marriage" as a "legal union between one man and one woman" deprive same-sex couples who are legally married under state laws of equal protection under federal law?