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7/14/1913: President Gerald R. Ford's birthday. He would appoint Justice John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

The growing strength of the various political movements for limiting judicial authority over constitutional questions has aroused a new interest in the origin of the courts' power. Wherever the source be found, or however the practice may have developed, the authority now exercised by the United States supreme court does not determine the proper function of state courts in local cases, which is now the chief issue; but its study throws some light on the attitude that each of the three departments of government—legislative, executive and judicial—ought to assume toward the subject of constitutional law, and is of particular interest to the many citizens whose opinion of the new proposals will be more or less favorable as they appear to bring us back nearer to original ideals or to carry us farther away. The historical study is interesting also in showing that our forefathers in their discussions by no means adopted the viewpoint of most of the modern writers—of assuming that whenever a law is declared unconstitutional, the court is always right, and is performing a public service in so deciding.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court decided four prominent (groups of) cases involving race. On each occasion, the civil rights claim won in some significant sense. One set of cases involved so-called peonage legislation-laws that coerced (primarily) black labor. In Bailey v. Alabama, the Court invalidated under the federal Peonage Act of 18672 and the Thirteenth Amendment an Alabama law making it a crime to enter, with fraudulent intent, into a labor contract that provided for advance payment of wages; the law made breach of the contract prima facie evidence of fraudulent intent, and Alabama evidence law did not permit laborers to rebut that presumption with their own testimony. Similarly, in United States v. Reynolds the Court struck down under the Thirteenth Amendment and the 1867 Peonage Act an Alabama law that criminalized breach of surety agreements under which private parties paid the costs and fines necessary to liberate convicted criminals from jail in exchange for promises to labor for a specified time. Second, the Court in McCabe v. Atchison, Topekhz & Santa Fe Railway Co. ruled that an Oklahoma law permitting railroads to exclude blacks from first class accommodations, rather than providing separate but equal facilities, violated the Fourteenth Amendment, notwithstanding the disparate per capita demand for such accommodations among the races. Third, the Court in Guinn v. Oklahoma and Myers v. Anderson6 invalidated under the Fifteenth Amendment grandfather clauses which had protected illiterate whites from disfranchisement by exempting from literacy tests those persons who were enfranchised in the mid-1860s (before southern blacks received the right to vote) or who were descended from such persons. Finally, in Buchanan v. Warley the Court invalidated a Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance that segregated neighborhood blocks by race. My goal in this Article is to "contextualize" these Progressive era race cases. That is, I seek to situate these decisions within the broader ...

In No. 78 of The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton wrote: "To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them…" Whatever acceptance this view of the judge as automaton and of the judicial process as a ministerial function may once have had, little trace remains of it today, after ten years of experience with the "reorganized" Supreme Court. The Roosevelt Court was not, of course, the first on which judicial decisions were influenced by the personal values of its justices. Throughout the history of the Court, the autobiographical element in its output has been as important as when Justice Holmes bluntly told his colleagues in 1905 that "this case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain." But the prevailing theory was that judges did not make law, they merely found it.The constitutional revolution of 1935–37 changed all that. The public, as Max Lerner says, "began to see that judicial decisions are not babies brought by constitutional storks, but are born out of the travail of economic circumstance." For two terms, the Constitution meant what Justice Roberts said it meant. After the consummation of the revolution, the forces which had been most ardent in picturing earlier conservative courts as demonstrating the workings of a government of law could only explain the strange phenomenon of a liberal court as the triumph of a government of men. Additional recent factors serving to underline the personal basis of judicial decisions have been the tossing of barbed phrases on the bench, Justice Jackson's ill-tempered public attack on one of his colleagues, and the mounting tide of dissenting opinions.

During the 1943–44 term of the Supreme Court, public attention was attracted to that body on several occasions by verbal exchanges in decisions of the Court which seemed unusually sharp and personal. On January 3, 1944, Justices Black and Murphy admonished Justice Frankfurter that "for judges to rest their interpretation of statutes on nothing but their own conceptions of 'morals' and 'ethics' is, to say the least, dangerous business." In another opinion on the same day, the same two judges referred to "what is patently a wholly gratuitous assertion as to constitutional law in the dissent of Mr. Justice Frankfurter." In the Magnolia Petroleum Co. case, Justice Jackson observed that the minority judges were apparently willing to enforce the full faith and credit clause "only if the outcome pleases…." Justice Murphy told the Court on one occasion that it was "rewriting" a criminal statute, Justice Jackson called the decision bringing insurance under the Sherman Act a "reckless" one, and Justice Roberts several times waxed sarcastic about the disregarding or over-ruling of precedents. "This tendency," he said, "indicates an intolerance for what those who have composed this court in the past have conscientiously and deliberately concluded, and involves an assumption that knowledge and wisdom reside in us which was denied to our predecessors." It is not surprising that the newspapers translated these disagreements into personal terms and began to write about the "feud that was smoldering behind the Grecian columns of the white marble court building."There are many reasons for not taking such accounts too seriously. Thomas Reed Powell has wisely warned "laymen … not to draw too broad conclusions from any reportorial propensity to play up judicial disagreements as contests like those in war or sports." Disagreement is no new thing on the Court. The faultless phrasing of the Holmes dissents may have raised to a higher plane, but did not conceal, differences as sharp as any evident during the past term.

Studies of policy making by courts need to examine the actual policy adopted in the majority opinion rather than studying votes. The authors examine the responsiveness of state supreme courts to precedents announced by the US Supreme Court by examining their treatment of the precedents in their opinions, testing the utility of precedent vitality versus the impact of ideological preferences. They find that the vitality of Supreme Court precedent is a strong predictor of the way in which the precedent is treated by state courts, even after controlling for ideological distance and institutional features of state court systems. Adapted from the source document.

7 p. type-written memorandum from University of Oregon President Robert D. Clark to the faculty regarding the court hearing on a disruption charge.

1/28/1916: President Wilson nominates Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. He would be confirmed on June 1, 1916.

Abstract
US and Canadian approaches to tribal legal orders have taken different paths, and here I argue that the Canadian model should move towards free-standing Indigenous courts as they currently exist in the United States. The Canadian approach has focussed on the issue of over-incarceration of Indigenous prisoners, but even newer efforts have stopped short of recognising at least partial criminal and civil jurisdiction. The Canadian approach fails to support Indigenous jurisdiction and community rebuilding and leaves Indigenous peoples vulnerable to non-Indigenous judges, who fail to accommodate Indigenous approaches to justice. Early attempts at shared jurisdiction have been naïve regarding Indigenous internal social processes and the struggle over what constitutes proper cultural practices. My data come from my own work with Coast Salish tribes, where I have studied tribal histories and legal practices on both sides of the international border as well their views of federal policy in both Canada and the United States.

This article examines the role of courts in rural sexual minorities' lives. It focuses first on state action, explaining that courts' failure to apply heightened scrutiny to sexual orientation classifications harms rural sexual minorities uniquely in family and employment law contexts, where judges explicitly invoke antigay rural norms to justify discriminatory treatment. It argues that by taking rural sexual minorities' relative political powerlessness into account in Equal Protection claims, courts are more likely to find that all sexual orientation classifications are suspect. It focuses second on private discrimination, and it discusses ways to protect and strengthen rural sexual minorities' privacy rights. It argues that privacy is central to protecting sexual minorities' liberty to live, create families, and work in rural environments.

8/4/1961: President Barack Obama's birthday. He would appoint two Justices to the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.