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B
A Massachusetts law required minors to gain parental consent before having an abortion. However, if either or both of the parents refused, a judge of the superior court could allow a minor to have the procedure "for good cause shown." In Bellotti, the issue was whether the law unconstitutionally did restrict the right of a minor to have an abortion.
Balliro presented an argument on behalf of Baird. Balliro argued that the Massachusetts law was unconstitutional because it effectively prevented minors from obtaining abortions. Balliro argued that the law imposed unconstitutional burdens on the right to have an abortion. The first burden, Balliro argued, was that the minor had to obtain the consent of two parents. The law had provisions for circumstances where there was a single parent due to death or desertion, but the law made no exception for other extenuating circumstances, like in the case of Moe. In Bellotti v. Baird, Moe was pregnant and seeking an abortion at the time of the initial court proceedings and did not want to tell her parents about her pregnancy because her parents had hostile views about abortion and her father had threatened to kill her boyfriend if she became pregnant. Under the Massachusetts law, parents could deny their consent to an abortion arbitrarily, which meant that even if a physician considered the abortion medically necessary, one or both parents could refuse their consent and prevent the minor from obtaining an abortion.
The second burden, Balliro argued, was what Balliro termed judicial override. A judge could override the parents and grant the minor consent for an abortion once the judge determined the minor was mature enough to make that decision. However, the judge also had the power to decline a minor’s request for an abortion even if the judge had determined that the minor was mature enough to make the decision on her own. Balliro argued that the law allowed judges to potentially deny a minor an abortion without cause, which was unconstitutional.
Baird’s other attorney, Henn, provided arguments for Baird as well. Henn based his arguments on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants all citizens equal protection under the law and ensures that laws treat citizens impartially. Henn argued that the Massachusetts law was unconstitutional because it treated minors seeking an abortion more strictly than minors seeking any other medical procedure. According to Henn, that violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it created an arbitrary distinction between minors seeking medical procedures and minors seeking abortions. Minors seeking other medical procedures, such as limb amputation, needed the consent of only one parent, whereas the Massachusetts law required a minor seeking an abortion to obtain the consent of both her parents.
Supreme Court judge White filed a dissenting opinion that disagreed with the majority opinion. He argued that it was in the best interests of a minor for her parents to participate in the decision to terminate the pregnancy, and that a minor’s parents should be notified if the minor seeks permission for an abortion by going before a judge.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Bellotti v. Baird affirmed that a woman’s right to an abortion was not contingent upon her age, and that the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution applied to adults as well as minors. The Court’s decision in Bellotti v. Baird became a precedent, meaning that future laws could not restrict the right of minors by requiring parental or judicial consent for an abortion. The ruling affirmed that a woman’s choice to have an abortion or to carry a pregnancy to term, whether she was a minor or an adult, was a personal decision that could not be subjected to the veto of a third party, in this case that of her parents or a judge.
A New York state law authorized judges to grant warrants for eavesdropping via wiretap if there was reasonable ground to believe that the eavesdropping would uncover evidence of a crime. The state law required an oath of a district attorney, attorney general, or high-ranking police officer that such reasonable grounds existed for the eavesdropping. The oath was required to state at whom the eavesdropping was directed, the telephone number involved, and the duration of the eavesdropping, which could not be longer than two months. The State of New York (plaintiff) brought a claim against Ralph Berger (defendant) for bribery after wiretapping a conversation between Berger and a third party. Berger challenged the constitutionality of the statute, arguing that it violated the Fourth Amendment. The trial court held the statute was valid and the appellate court affirmed. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari. +
D
A corporation alleged defamation by multiple Doe defendants on a Yahoo! message board and sought expedited discovery in order to learn their identities.
The original Superior Court case, Dendrite International, Inc. v. Does, was a lawsuit brought by Dendrite International, Inc. (since acquired by Cegedim), a company that provided pharmaceutical-industry-specific customer relationship management software, against fourteen anonymous defendants. These individuals had posted messages on a Yahoo message board which Dendrite claimed were breaches of contract, were defamatory and contained trade secrets.
The plaintiffs requested that the court reveal the identity of four of the Does. However, unlike judges in previous similar cases, the trial judge ordered that a notice be posted on the message board alerting the Does that Dendrite was subpoenaing Yahoo, enabling some of the Does to contest the action. In November 2000, the trial judge granted the company's motion to conduct limited discovery to ascertain the identities of Does No. 1 and 2, but denied access to Does 3 and 4.
Doe No. 3's comments were related to alleged changes in the company's accounting practices and discussed the CEO's unsuccessful attempts to sell the company. The trial judge felt that Dendrite had failed to prove that it was harmed by the allegations, and found that the conduct of Does No. 3 and 4 did not warrant the revocation of their constitutional protections. Dendrite appealed the decision with respect to Doe No. 3.
The appellate court affirmed the Morris County court's opinion, finding that Dendrite's prima facie case did not merit the unmasking of Doe No. 3.
The standard set by this case has been applied to several others, some in states other than New Jersey, including Indiana. +
H
A female minor, known by her initials H.L., was living in Utah with her parents when she became pregnant in 1978. A doctor advised H.L. that an abortion would be in her best medical interests. A Utah law enacted in 1974 required abortion providers to "notify, if possible" the parents of any female under the age of majority who is scheduled to undergo an abortion, at least 24 hours before the abortion. Violation was a misdemeanor subject to a fine up to $1000 and/or several months imprisonment. H.L. initiated a lawsuit as part of a proposed class action of unmarried unemancipated females, arguing that Utah's parental notification statute was unconstitutional. Scott M. Matheson, then the governor of Utah, was named as the defendant. +
U
A government informant, Harvey Jackson, wore a concealed radio transmitter and engaged in four conversations with defendant White at three different locations: Jackson's house, a restaurant, and Jackson's automobile. Government agents listened to each of the radio transmissions, thereby overhearing defendant White make self-incriminating remarks regarding his involvement in multiple narcotics transactions. Jackson was unavailable during the trial, so the prosecution offered the testimony of the agents who had conducted the electronic surveillance as evidence.
Criminal defendant White was convicted of narcotics charges in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. The conviction was based on evidence obtained from recorded conversations in 1965 and 1966 between the defendant White and a government informant wearing a concealed radio transmitter. White appealed the conviction, claiming the conversations were recorded without his permission, that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy (see Katz), and the conversations were recorded without a warrant, violating his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Thus, White argued that the recorded conversations should not have been admitted as evidence. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 405 F.2d 838, reversed the district court and remanded, and certiorari was granted. +
A three judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the district court on the Fourth Amendment issue in August 2015, but the full court en banc upheld the district court in May 2016.
The Defendants, Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan, were charged for a series of armed robberies of commercial entities including a Burger King restaurant and a McDonald's restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland on February 5, 2011. Ten minutes after the McDonald's robbery, the defendants were found and arrested by the police and, upon request, provided their cell phone numbers to the officers at the scene. Two cell phones were recovered from the Defendant's car, which matched the numbers that the Defendants had provided earlier. Before Baltimore Detective Christopher Woerner searched the contents of the phones, he requested search warrants for the devices from the Circuit Court.
On March 25, 2011, Magistrate Judge Susan K. Gauvey granted the government's request to order Sprint/Nextel, Inc. to "disclose to the government 'the identification and address of cellular towers (cell site locations) related to the use of' the Defendants' cellular telephones" pursuant to the Stored Communications Act. The order requested the disclosure of geographic data for August 10–15, 2010; September 18–20, 2010; January 21–23, 2011; and February 4–5, 2011 dates important for linking the defendants to the robberies. Gauvey determined that the goal of linking the suspects to the robberies fit the standard of the government offering "specific and articulable facts." On July 15, 2011, the government was granted a second order from Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm for the cell site location for the period of July 1, 2010 through February 6, 2011. Spring/Nextel, Inc. provided the data to the government pursuant to this order.
On December 8, 2011, Judge Bennett of the District Court held a hearing to determine if the Cellular Phone Data and Historical Cell Site Location Data should be granted the motion to suppress at the Defendant's request.
Regarding the government's argument about the defendant's lack of standing because of the fictitious name he used, the Court considered the issue combined with the legitimacy of the expectation of privacy in the historical cell site location data. The court cited Katz v. United States, wherein it was stated that any object that a person knowingly exposes to the public, cannot rightfully be claimed as the subject of a Fourth Amendment protection. However, anything that a person strives to protect as private, even if such object is situated in an area accessible to the public, may fall under the purview of the Fourth Amendment.
In Katz v. United States, Justice Harlan evolved a two-prong test to determine when an object may be the subject of a Fourth Amendment protection. He stated that protection may be extended to those areas where a person has a subjective expectation of privacy, and that expectation is also objectively reasonable.Justice Rehnquist reiterated this principle in Rakas v. Illinois, when he stated that a 'legitimate expectation of privacy' cannot be confined to a mere subjective expectation of something being kept private. He stated that a legitimate expectation of privacy "must have a source outside of the Fourth Amendment, either by reference to concepts of real or personal property or to understandings that are recognized and permitted by society."
The court in this case declined to consider the issue of the defendants' 'standing' separately from the issue of the legitimate expectation of privacy in the historical cell site location data. The court pronounced that the real and substantial issue to be decided in the case was whether the defendants had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the historical cell site location data or not
In August 2015, a three judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to overturn the district court ruling that Fourth Amendment rights were not violated. "We conclude that the government's warrantless procurement of the CSLI (cell site location information) was an unreasonable search in violation of Appellants' Fourth Amendment rights. Nevertheless, because the government relied in good faith on court orders issued in accordance with Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or the Stored Communications Act ("SCA"), we hold the court's admission of the challenged evidence must be sustained." The government asked the court to rehear the case en banc. Oral arguments in the appeal were heard March 23, 2016.
E
Appellee attacks his conviction of violating Massachusetts law for giving a woman a contraceptive foam at the close of his lecture to students on contraception. That law makes it a felony for anyone to give away a drug, medicine, instrument, or article for the prevention of conception except in the case of (1) a registered physician administering or prescribing it for a married person or (2) an active registered pharmacist furnishing it to a married person presenting a registered physician's prescription. The District Court dismissed appellee's petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The Court of Appeals vacated the dismissal, holding that the statute is a prohibition on contraception per se, and conflicts "with fundamental human rights" under Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479. Appellant, inter alia, argues that appellee lacks standing to assert the rights of unmarried persons denied access to contraceptives because he was neither an authorized distributor under the statute nor a single person unable to obtain contraceptives. +
L
Arlo Tatum, the executive secretary of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, sued Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense. Tatum sued after Washington Monthly published an article revealing that US military intelligence units were gathering intelligence on civilians and civil organizations in the US.
The Court was initially divided into three camps. Justices Rehnquist and Powell initially urged the conservatives to determine that the surveillance program was constitutional. However, Chief Justice Burger, and Justices Blackmun and White determined that it would be more controversial for the Court to enter into a political question." After further reflection Powell concluded that it was unwise to rule on the constitutionality of the surveillance program and that the issue was best decided on the principle of ripeness. That is, in the absence of a discernable injury, the issue was too speculative for the Court to rule upon. Burger eventually prevailed on Rehnquist to abandon a concurrence and join with the majority.
The Court determined that the plaintiff's claim was based on the fear that sometime in the future the Army might cause harm with information retrieved during their surveillance, but that there was no present threat. Therefore, the claim was too "speculative."
Mr. Justice Douglas wrote in dissent, with Mr. Justice Marshall concurring:
This case involves a cancer in our body politic. It is a measure of the disease which afflicts us. Army surveillance, like Army regimentation, is at war with the principles of the First Amendment. Those who already walk submissively will say there is no cause for alarm. But submissiveness is not our heritage. The First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our heritage. The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and expression, of the press, of political and social activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. The aim was to allow men to be free and independent and to assert their rights against government. There can be no influence more paralyzing of that objective than Army surveillance. When an intelligence officer looks over every nonconformist's shoulder in the library, or walks invisibly by his side in a picket line, or infiltrates his club, the America once extolled as the voice of liberty heard around the world no longer is cast in the image which Jefferson and Madison designed, but more in the Russian image.
C
At that time, Kentucky law criminalized consensual sexual relations between people of the same sex, even if conducted in private. Such conduct was a misdemeanor punishable by up to 12 months in jail and a fine of up to $500. Solicitation of same was also a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $250.
Jeffery Wasson was arrested and charged with solicitation of same sex sodomy as the result of an undercover operation conducted by the Lexington, Kentucky police. The police drove to a selected area and conversed with people to see if they would be solicited for sex. An undercover officer taped approximately 20 minutes of a conversation with Wasson. Near the end of the conversation Wasson invited the officer to come home with him. When prodded for details, Wasson suggested sexual activities that violated the Kentucky statute prohibiting homosexual activity. In its recitation of the facts, the Kentucky Supreme Court noted that there "was no suggestion that sexual activity would occur anyplace other than in the privacy of Wasson's home. The sexual activity was intended to have been between consenting adults. No money was offered or solicited."
The initial trial court, Fayette District Court, dismissed the charges holding that the law was unconstitutional. Upon appeal, the Fayette Circuit Court reached the same conclusion. The Commonwealth appealed that decision. The Kentucky Supreme Court granted a transfer, bypassing the Kentucky Court of Appeals. +
F
Betty Jean Freedman (referred to as B.J.F. in the filings) was a woman who reported to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office that she had been robbed and sexually assaulted. The Sheriff's Office put the details of what happened, including the victim's full name, in the general crime report for the county, which is placed in its press room and made available. A trainee reporter for The Florida Star, a local newspaper in Jacksonville, Florida, copied the item verbatim. A Florida Star reporter then included the item in the October 29, 1983 issue of the paper, but erroneously included the victim's name in violation of the newspaper's internal policy not to identify rape victims.
On September 26, 1984, Freedman sued both the Sheriff's Office and the newspaper for violating Florida's shield law, Stat. § 794.03, which makes it unlawful to "print, publish, or broadcast... in any instrument of mass communication" the name of the victim of a sexual offense. The Sheriff's Office settled, paying the victim $2,500, but the newspaper would not. The trial court rejected the newspaper's defense that § 794.03 was unconstitutional, and the jury awarded Freedman $75,000 in compensatory damages and $25,000 in punitive damages.
The Florida First District Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court verdict, the Supreme Court of Florida denied discretionary review, and the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari. +
B
Bonita Bourke and Rhonda Hall were hired by Nissan in June 1989, as Information Systems Specialists at an Infiniti car dealership, serving as customer service representatives for users of the internal computer system.
In June 1990, a co-worker of plaintiffs, Lori Eaton, during a demonstration of the use of E-mail at a training session, randomly selected a message sent by Bourke to an employee of the dealership. Unfortunately, the E-mail contained non-business-related content of a highly personal, sexual nature.
This incident was reported to management and many other messages containing personal content involving Bourke and her colleague Hall were later discovered. Following this, written warnings were issued to plaintiffs for violating the company policy prohibiting the use of the company computer system for personal purposes.
During the annual performance review in October 1990, both plaintiffs had received rather low performance ratings (Bourke was rated “needs improvement,” and Hall was rated “unsatisfactory,” second lowest and lowest of six performance level, respectively).
On December 28, 1990, plaintiffs filed grievances with Nissan's human resources department, complaining that the company had invaded their privacy by retrieving and reading their email messages. A few days later, on January 2, 1991, Bourke was given a final warning notice requiring her to improve her performance, while Hall's employment was terminated.
Based upon Nissan's actions in reviewing their email messages as described above, plaintiffs sued Nissan for common law invasion of privacy, violation of their constitutional right to privacy, and violation of California's criminal wiretapping and eavesdropping statutes. They also brought a cause of action for wrongful discharge in violation of public policy (termination in retaliation for the filing of complaints objecting to Nissan's invasion of their privacy).
The court found that the employees had no reasonable expectation of privacy, citing the following undisputed facts: (1) Plaintiffs each signed a Computer User Registration Form, which states that "It is company policy that employees and contractors restrict their use of company-owned computer hardware and software to company business." (2) The two had been aware for months that E-mail messages were, from time to time, read by individuals other than the intended recipient. (3) In June 1990, a full six months before Bourke's termination, fellow employee, Lori Eaton, had contacted Bourke to complain about the personal, sexual nature of Bourke's E-mail message which Eaton had retrieved for demonstration purposes during a training session at an Infiniti dealership.
The court found that the statute of Penal Code Section 631 does not apply to the facts of this case, since plaintiffs cited no authority to support their contention that section 631 covers the retrieval, printing and reading of email messages which is not authorized by the author of the message.The court found that section 632 (which prohibits the eavesdropping or recording of a "confidential communication by means of any electronic amplifying or recording device"), does not apply in this case.
The court argued that a claim for wrongful termination in violation of public policy necessarily requires a violation of public policy; however, as concluded in section I., Nissan's actions in reviewing plaintiffs' E-mail messages did not violate their constitutional right to privacy. Therefore, the Court held that plaintiffs had failed to state a claim for wrongful termination in violation of public policy.
Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, 506 U.S. 263 (1993), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that 42 U.S.C. 1985(3) does not provide a federal cause of action against persons obstructing access to abortion clinics. Several abortion clinics (most known was the Alexandria Health Clinic) sued to prevent Jayne Bray and other anti-abortion protesters from voicing their freedom of speech in front of the clinics in Washington D.C. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic claimed that the protesters violated 42 U.S.C. 1985(3), which prohibits two or more people on a highway or another's premises from depriving “any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws.” +
K
Charles Katz was a resident of Los Angeles, California, who had long been involved in sports betting. By the mid-1960s, he had become "probably the preeminent college basketball handicapper in America." In February 1965, Katz on several occasions used a public telephone booth near his apartment on Sunset Boulevard to provide his gambling handicaps to bookmakers in Boston and Miami. Unbeknownst to him, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had begun investigating his gambling activities and was recording his conversations via a covert listening device attached to the outside of the phone booth. After recording a number of his phone calls, FBI agents arrested Katz and charged him with eight counts of knowingly transmitting wagering information over the telephone between U.S. states, which is a federal crime under 18 U.S.C. § 1084.
Katz was tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Katz's lawyer made a motion to have the court suppress the FBI's recordings as evidence, arguing that because the FBI agents did not have a search warrant allowing them to place their listening device, the recordings had been made in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The judge denied his motion and ruled that the recordings were admissible, and Katz was convicted based on them.
Katz appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In November 1966, the Ninth Circuit affirmed Katz's conviction, ruling that because the FBI's eavesdropping device did not physically penetrate the telephone booth's wall, no Fourth Amendment search occurred, and so the FBI did not need a search warrant to place the device.
Katz then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case and ordered certiorari. On December 18, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision in favor of Katz that invalidated the FBI's wiretap and overturned Katz's conviction. +
U
Defendant Bradford C. Councilman was Vice President of Interloc, Inc., which ran an online rare and out-of-print book listing service. As part of its service, Interloc gave book dealer customers an e-mail address at the domain "interloc.com" and acted as the e-mail provider. Councilman managed the e-mail service and the dealer subscription list.
On July 11, 2001, a grand jury returned a two-count indictment against Councilman. Count One charged him under 18 U.S.C. § 371, the general federal criminal conspiracy statute, and for conspiracy to violate the Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2511. According to the indictment, in January 1998, Councilman directed Interloc employees to intercept and copy all incoming communications to subscriber dealers from Amazon.com, an Internet retailer that sells books and other products. The alleged object of the conspiracy was to exploit the content of e-mail from Amazon.com to dealers in order to develop a list of books, learn about competitors, and attain a commercial advantage for Interloc and its parent company.
Councilman moved to dismiss the indictment for failure to state an offense under the Wiretap Act, arguing that the intercepted e-mail messages were in "electronic storage," as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 2510(17), and therefore were not, as a matter of law, subject to the prohibition on "intercepting . . . electronic communications," 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a). The district court granted Councilman's motion, and a divided three-judge panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. However, the First Circuit then reviewed the decision en banc and reversed. +
I
DoubleClick, a Delaware corporation, is the largest provider of Internet advertising products and services in the world. Its Internet-based advertising network of over 11,000 Web publishers has enabled DoubleClick to become the market leader in delivering online advertising. DoubleClick specializes in collecting, compiling and analyzing information about Internet users through proprietary technologies and techniques, and using it to target online advertising. DoubleClick has placed billions of advertisements on its clients' behalf and its services reach the majority of Internet users in the United States.
Although a comprehensive description of the Internet is unnecessary to address the issues raised in this motion, a rudimentary grasp of its architecture and engineering is important. The Internet is accurately described as a "network of networks." Computer networks are interconnected individual computers that share information. Anytime two or more computer networks connect, they form an "internet." The "Internet" is a shorthand name for the vast collection of interconnected computer networks that evolved from the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network ("ARPANet") developed by the United States Defense Department in the 1960's and 1970's. Today, the Internet spans the globe and connects hundreds of thousands of independent networks.
The World Wide Web ("the Web" or "WWW") is often mistakenly referred to as the Internet. However, the two are quite different. The Internet is the physical infrastructure of the online world: the servers, computers, fiber-optic cables and routers through which data is shared online. The Web is data: a vast collection of documents containing text, visual images, audio clips and other information media that is accessed through the Internet. Computers known as "servers" store these documents and make them available over the Internet through "TCP/IP" (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), a set of standard operating and transmission protocols that structure the Web's operation. Every document has a unique "URL" (Universal Resource Locator) that identifies its physical location in the Internet's infrastructure. Users access documents by sending request messages to the servers that store the documents. When a server receives a user's request (for example, for Lycos.com's home page), it prepares the document and then transmits the information back to the user.
The Internet utilizes a technology called "packet switching" to carry data. Packet switching works as follows. The computer wishing to send a document ("originating computer"), such as a music file or digital image, cuts the document up into many small "packets" of information. Each packet contains the Internet Protocol ("IP") address of the destination Web site, a small portion of data from the original document, and an indication of the data's place in the original document. The originating computer then sends all of the packets through its local network to an external "router." A router is a device that contains continuously-updated directories of Internet addresses called "routing tables." The router takes each packet from the original document and sends it to the next available router in the direction of the destination Web site. Because each router is connected to many other routers and because the connection between any two given routers may be congested with traffic at a given moment, packets from the same document are often sent to different routers. Each of these routers, in turn, repeats this process, forwarding each packet it receives to the next available router in the direction of the destination Web site. Collectively, this process is called "dynamic routing."
The result is that packets of information from the originating computer may take entirely different routes over the Internet (i.e., traveling over different routers and cables) to their ultimate destination. Obviously, the packets arrive out of their original order because some have been forced to take much longer or slower routes between the originating and destination computers. However, because each packet *502 contains code that identifies its place in the original document, the destination computer is able to reassemble the original document from the disorganized packets. At that point, the destination computer sends a message back to the originating computer either reporting that it received the full message, or requesting that the originating computer re-send any packets that never arrived. This entire process typically occurs in a matter of seconds. Packet-switching technology and dynamic routing have helped to give the Internet's infrastructure its extraordinary efficiency and resiliency.
B
Dubreuil proceedings (state legal proceedings used to compel a pregnant woman to undergo medical confinement, treatment, and procedures against her wishes for the benefit of the unborn fetus) were initiated against Burton on a finding that she had ignored her physician’s recommendations, creating a high-risk pregnancy that may result in the death of her baby. A Florida circuit court ordered Burton to forced medial treatment and confinement in a hospital until delivery. Holding that such a determination was inappropriate, the Court reasoned that all individuals have a fundamental right to privacy. The Court explained that Dubreuil proceedings were insufficient to compel a pregnant woman to forcibly undergo medical detention and treatment for the benefit of her unborn child. To overcome Burton’s right to refuse medical intervention in her pregnancy, the State must show a compelling interest and a method for pursuing that interest that is narrowly tailored. The State had failed to do so.
David H. Abrams, a nurse attorney, appealed the Leon County Circuit Court ruling and the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union joined as Amicus. On August 12, 2010, the Florida Circuit Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit issued its ruling, written by Nikki Clark, in favor of Burton and against the State. The Court rejected the State of Florida's argument that the best interest of the child standard applied. The Court ruled that Ms. Burton had fundamental rights to privacy and liberty under the Florida Constitution and that those rights were subject to strict scrutiny review. While the Court did not hold that the State could never intervene in a woman's pregnancy it limited such intervention to instances where fetal viability was proven by the state and rejected the argument that viability is set by gestational age of the fetus. The Court further held that once the State had proven viability it must then show that the proposed intervention is the least intrusive and least restrictive means possible of protecting the State's interest in the fetus.
C
Employees of the City of Ontario, California police department filed a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claim in a California federal district court against the police department, city, chief of police, and an internal affairs officer. They alleged Fourth Amendment violations in relation to the police department's review of text messages made by an employee on a city issued text-message pager. While the city did not have an official text-messaging privacy policy, it did have a general "Computer Usage, Internet and E-mail Policy." The policy in part stated that "the City of Ontario reserves the right to monitor and log all network activity including e-mail and Internet use, with or without notice," and that "users should have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality when using these resources." Employees were told verbally that the text-messaging pagers were considered e-mail and subject to the general policy. The district court entered judgment in favor of the defendants.
On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed in part. The court held that city employees had a reasonable expectation of privacy for the text messages they sent on their city-issued pagers because there was no text message privacy policy in place. Moreover, the court noted that the police department's review of the text messages was unreasonable because it could have used "less intrusive methods" to determine whether employees' had properly used the text messaging service. +
T
For their own protection, after a person has been stopped, police may perform a quick surface search of the person's outer clothing for weapons if they have reasonable suspicion that the person stopped is armed. This reasonable suspicion must be based on "specific and articulable facts" and not merely upon an officer's hunch. This permitted police action has subsequently been referred to in short as a "stop and frisk," or simply a "Terry frisk". The Terry standard was later extended to temporary detentions of persons in vehicles, known as traffic stops; see Terry stop for a summary of subsequent jurisprudence.
The rationale behind the Supreme Court decision revolves around the understanding that, as the opinion notes, "the exclusionary rule has its limitations." The meaning of the rule is to protect persons from unreasonable searches and seizures aimed at gathering evidence, not searches and seizures for other purposes (like prevention of crime or personal protection of police officers).
The Terry case involved an incident that took place on October 31, 1963, in Cleveland, Ohio. A local policeman named Martin McFadden was on duty in downtown Cleveland and noticed two men standing on a street corner. He watched one of the men, John W. Terry, walk down the street, stop in front of a certain store, look through its window, then briefly continue on before turning around and returning to where he started, stopping on his way back to look in the store window again. Then the other man, Richard Chilton, did the same thing. McFadden watched the pair repeat this routine about a dozen times, then a third man joined them and the three walked up the street together toward the store. McFadden suspected that the men were "casing" the store in preparation for robbing it, so he followed and confronted them. He asked the men's names, and they gave noncommittal mumbling answers. McFadden then grabbed the two men, spun them around, patted down their exterior clothing, and discovered that they both had pistols in their jacket pockets.
After discovering the pistols, McFadden arrested Terry and Chilton, and they were both charged with illegally carrying concealed weapons. At trial, Terry's lawyer made a motion to suppress the evidence of the discovered pistol, arguing that the "frisk" by which McFadden had discovered it was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and therefore that the judge should exclude the pistol from evidence per the exclusionary rule. The trial judge denied his motion on the basis that the "stop-and-frisk" was generally presumed legal, and Terry was convicted. He appealed to the Ohio District Court of Appeals, which affirmed his conviction, then appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which dismissed his appeal. He then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case and granted certiorari.
H
Hoang, whose real name is Huong Hoang (Vietnamese Hoàng Hương), is a Vietnamese-American actress. She had small parts in films such as Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver, Hoodrats 2: Hoodrat Warriors, and My Big Phat Hip Hop Family, as well as guest roles on television series such as I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant.
In October 2011, Hoang filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and its parent company Amazon.com, alleging that IMDb had accessed her account information to obtain her true birth date (July 16, 1971), then displayed it as part of the information on her entry as an actress. Her complaint alleged that the use of her account information was wrongful and that publication of the information would cause her to suffer age discrimination in casting.
Hoang's lawsuit was originally filed under the name "Jane Doe", but in December 2011, U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman in Seattle dismissed the original lawsuit with leave to refile under her own name, saying the actress had no grounds to proceed with an anonymous complaint. On January 6, 2012, Hoang refiled, revealing her name.
In March 2013, Judge Pechman granted Amazon's motion for summary judgment, releasing it from the case; and IMDb's motion for summary judgment on Hoang's Washington state's Consumer Protection Act claim and emotional distress claims. The case went to trial on April 9, 2013 on the remaining cause of action, IMDb's alleged breach of contract, with IMDb as the sole defendant. On April 11, 2013, a federal jury in Seattle rejected the breach of contract claim.
In May 2013, Hoang filed a notice of appeal in the case. Hoang's opening brief was filed on October 30, and IMDb's answering brief was filed December 24; Hoang voluntarily dismissed Amazon.com from the appeal on November 4. Hoang's reply brief was filed February 3, 2014.
There were two motions made to file amicus curiae briefs in support of Hoang; one by four screenwriters David Ransil, Brad Markowitz, Steven Tag Mendillo and Mark Lisson on November 20; and one by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) on November 25. Both motions were denied, because they did not address the ground on which Hoang had appealed.
Oral argument in the case was held in Seattle on February 6, 2015. The Ninth Circuit panel was composed of circuit judges Carlos T. Bea and Mary H. Murguia, and district judge William H. Orrick III, sitting by designation.
On March 27, 2015, the Ninth Circuit panel unanimously affirmed the decision in favor of IMDb.
Two actors' unions, SAG and AFTRA, supported Hoang, saying that IMDb was "facilitating age discrimination".
L
In 1998, John Geddes Lawrence Jr. was arrested along with an acquaintance at his apartment in Harris County, Texas, when sheriff's deputies found them engaging in sexual intercourse. Lawrence and his partner, Tyron Garner, were charged with a misdemeanor under Texas' anti-sodomy law; both pleaded no contest and received a fine. Assisted by the American civil rights organization Lambda Legal, Lawrence and Garner appealed their sentences to the Texas Courts of Appeals, which ruled in 2000 that the sodomy law was unconstitutional. Texas appealed to have the court rehear the case en banc, and in 2001 it overturned its prior judgment and upheld the law. Lawrence appealed this decision to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which denied his request for appeal. Lawrence then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case.
The Supreme Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas in a 6–3 decision and, by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The Court, with a five-justice majority, overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy. It explicitly overruled Bowers, holding that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly. The Court held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Lawrence invalidated similar laws throughout the United States that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, whatever the sex of the participants.
The case attracted much public attention, and many amici curiae ("friends of the court") briefs were filed. Its outcome was celebrated by gay rights advocates, and set the stage for further reconsideration of standing law, including the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges which recognized same-sex marriage as a fundamental right under the United States Constitution.
Legal punishments for sodomy often included heavy fines, prison sentences, or both, with some states, beginning with Illinois in 1827, denying other rights, such as suffrage, to anyone convicted of the crime of sodomy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several states imposed various eugenics laws against anyone deemed to be a "sexual pervert". As late as 1970, Connecticut denied a driver's license to a man for being an "admitted homosexual".
As of 1960, every state had an anti-sodomy law. In 1961, the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code advocated the repeal of sodomy laws as they applied to private, adult, consensual behavior. Two years later the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took its first major case in opposition to these laws. Most judges were largely unsympathetic to the substantive due process claims raised.
In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court struck down a law barring the use of contraceptives by married couples. In Griswold, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that couples, at least married couples, had a right to privacy, drawing on the Fourth Amendment's protection of private homes from searches and seizures without a warrant based on probable cause, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law in the states, and the Ninth Amendment's assurance that rights not specified in the Constitution are "retained by the people". Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) expanded the scope of sexual privacy rights to unmarried persons. In 1973, the choice whether to have an abortion was found to be protected by the Constitution in Roe v. Wade.
In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court heard a constitutional challenge to sodomy laws brought by a man who had been arrested, but was not prosecuted, for engaging in oral sex with another man in his home. The Court rejected this challenge in a 5 to 4 decision. Justice Byron White's majority opinion emphasized that Eisenstadt and Roe had only recognized a right to engage in procreative sexual activity, and that long-standing moral antipathy toward homosexual sodomy was enough to argue against the notion of a right to sodomy. Justice Blackmun, writing in dissent, argued that Eisenstadt held that the Constitution protects people as individuals, not as family units. He then reasoned that because state intrusions are equally burdensome on an individual's personal life regardless of his marital status or sexual orientation, there is no reason to treat the rights of citizens in same-sex couples any differently.
By the time of the Lawrence decision, ten states—Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Utah and Virginia—still banned consensual sodomy without respect to the sex of those involved, and four—Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri—prohibited same-sex couples from engaging in anal and oral sex.
On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision in favor of Lawrence that struck down Texas's statute. Five justices held it violated the Due Process Clause, while a sixth, Sandra Day O'Connor, held it violated the Equal Protection Clause.