It is fair to say that the government’s preeminent responsibility is to provide for the nation’s defense. When necessary, civil liberties...

In 1940, in Minersville v. Gobitis, the Supreme Court upheld a state law requiring school children to salute the flag, despite religious...

In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court, in one of the most controversial decisions of the Warren Court era, held school-led...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s first major ruling on the meaning of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause was in Everson v. Board of...

In his unanimous opinion for the Supreme Court in the watershed case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Chief Justice Earl Warren...

“If it was not the most important decision in the history of the Court,” Justice Stanley Reed observed of Brown v. Board of Education,...

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s recess appointment of Earl Warren to the Chief Justiceship of Supreme Court on September 30, 1953,...

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the most-celebrated civil rights decision in our nation’s...

Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only dissenter from the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, in...

Not all landmark Supreme Court decisions are admirable. Some are frankly infamous, including Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1896, in Plessy, the...

Vladimir Putin’s infliction on the Russian people of a second Iron Curtain has demonstrated more effectively than any number of seminars...

The Pentagon Papers Case, which proceeded through the federal courts at record pace, presented the U.S. Supreme Court with a sharply...

Thomas Jefferson once observed that fearless, independent newspapers were indispensable to the American experiment, and to “the...

For a nation grounded on the republican values of self government and freedom of expression, both of which are served and ...

The Supreme Court’s decision in The New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), checks all the definitional boxes of a landmark ruling. It...

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s iconic dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States (1919) transformed the Clear and Present Danger Test...

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion for the Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States (1919) shocked his libertarian friends and...

America’s free speech story, as written in Supreme Court decisions, did not begin until World War I when the Court declared in 1919, in...

Great questions of constitutional law—how can the president be held accountable, whether the president is amenable to the judicial...

In 1958, in Cooper v. Aaron, the Supreme Court, ensnared in the white-hot cauldron of southern resistance to federal authority, the...