Articles Posted in Constitutional Law

Citing flaws in the current technology, a federal judge has ordered Georgia officials to stop using its outdated electronic voting machines by the end of 2019.

Last week, a federal judge in Santa Ana, California ruled that the Second Amendment does not prevent California from enacting reasonable gun safety laws. This case arose when the California Rifle and Pistol Association, part of the National Rifle Association, challenged a state law that prevents California residents from making, owning,…

On Wednesday, July 10, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously dismissed a lawsuit that claimed President Trump is violating the so-called Emoluments Clauses of the U.S. Constitution by accepting payments from state and foreign governments at his luxury hotel in downtown Washington. Brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, the lawsuit alleged that the type of business transactions with foreign governments was exactly the type anticipated and prohibited by our nation's founders.

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that President Donald J. Trump engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, in violation of the First Amendment, by blocking certain users' access to his Twitter account based on those users' speech on Twitter. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued the President on behalf of seven Twitter users who were blocked from the President's Twitter account after said users tweeted replies to the President critical of his personality and policies. Judge Barrington D. Parker concluded "that the First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees."

According to news reports, since May the federal government has filed four condemnation lawsuits against local residents in the Brownsville, Texas area for the purpose of constructing a border wall along the southern border of the US. Some residents, who have been informed that the government wants access to their property for purposes of surveying land that would be involved in border wall construction, are contesting the government's terms for use of their land.

Using state driver's license databases, agents are scanning through millions of Americans' faces without their knowledge or consent.

On Monday, June 24, 2019, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in Iancu v. Brunetti, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), holding that the Lanham Act's bar on registration of immoral or scandalous trademarks violates the First Amendment. At issue in the case is the trademark FUCT, pronounced as four letters, which is the clothing brand founded by Erik Brunetti. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, wrote that the Lanham Act's bar on immoral or scandalous trademarks is viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. 

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has canceled the deportation of a worker who was arrested and detained in a 2008 immigration enforcement raid on a California factory, ruling that immigration authorities violated federal regulations and the Constitution when they conducted the raid without reasonable suspicion that the approximately 130 people they detained were in the country without authorization.

Recent investigations have revealed that telecommunications companies have sold the real-time location data of their customers without the informed consent of the customers. In other situations, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint simply have allowed third parties to access the data, rather than actively selling it to them. As a result, a group of parties include…

The ruling stemmed from the arrest of a man who had yelled "f--- you" out of his car window at an Arkansas state trooper.