Michael Arnheim

The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1967, made some arrangements about the presidency and vice presidency. Most of the 25th Amendment addresses points like who replaces the US president if he dies while in office or resigns, how to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency, and how a president can temporarily transfer powers to the vice president in the event he cannot discharge his duties.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes famously remarked that, “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and our property under the Constitution.” The Chief Justice was right to point out that the meaning of the Constitution keeps changing as a result of judicial interpretation and reinterpretation, without any change in the words on paper.

The Constitution emerged from a meeting called the Philadelphia Convention, which took place in 1787. (That meeting has since come to be known also as the Constitutional Convention.) The Convention was held because the Articles of Confederation — the document that had been serving as the country’s first governing constitution — were considered to be weak and problematic.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, ending nearly 50 years of a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. The decision allows individual states the ability to set their own abortion laws, banning or restricting the procedure as they see fit.The nation was expecting the landmark decision due to a leaked draft of the Supreme Court's deliberations in the related case Dobbs v.

Marbury v. Madison established the U.S. Supreme Court’s right of judicial review — the power to strike down a law as unconstitutional. William Marbury was appointed a Justice of the Peace by outgoing President John Adams. But the new Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to deliver Marbury’s commission — the formal document of appointment.

This case is remarkable for several reasons, not least because the U.S. Supreme Court decision was unanimous, ruling that trawling through the digital contents of a cellphone without a warrant is unconstitutional as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The case arose out of an incident in 2009 in which David Leon Riley was pulled over in his Lexus by a San Diego police officer for expired registration tags.

This highly controversial case is important for two reasons: first, because of its effect on elections, and secondly, because it struck down a major bipartisan Act of Congress, which had been essentially upheld by the Supreme Court itself.The conservative nonprofit organization Citizens United wanted to run TV commercials to promote its film Hillary: The Movie in the run-up to the 2008 Democratic presidential primary elections.

This was a U.S. Supreme Court 5–4 decision upholding the constitutionality under the Eighth Amendment of lethal injection by a three-drug protocol including midazolam as an acceptable form of execution. The Court also, rather strangely, held that death-row prisoners could challenge their method of execution only if they came up with an alternative method!

This landmark 5–4 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalized same-sex marriage throughout the United States and its possessions and territories. It marked the culmination of a long battle fought out in a number of states, 37 of which, plus the District of Columbia, had legalized gay marriage prior to the ruling and 13 of which had banned it.