The Rights Of The United States

In the Court’s highly fragmented decision, the justices attempted to define a proper balance of and boundary between federal and state authority: by arguing that state action constituted only those acts sanctioned by the state’s laws and by dismissing Section 20 for vagueness, the major block of dissenters suggested that the risk posed to state autonomy by federal intervention was too great; by recognizing the defendants’ actions as those perpetrated “under color of law” and by creating a “willful” test for acts under Section 20, the majority Opinion affirmed the federal government’s interest in protecting the rights of citizens from abuse by state authority, but provided it with a tenuous means for defending those liberties.

“The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” (Pollman, 1643)

Today, I am presented with a case that puts in question the violation of individual’s Fourth Amendment rights. This case also puts in question the rights of the authority placed in our streets, neighborhoods and towns to perform actions directed towards certain citizens in an effort to serve and protect the overall population. There must be a careful analysis in order to interpret the records of the incident that occurred to conclude who holds the most justified position in this case under the applicable laws. The Court of Appeals of the State of New York must also take into careful consideration the circumstances discussed and the ruling given by the District Court assigned to this case, which I

Topic: The administrators of the Columbus, Ohio, Public School System temporarily suspended several students without a formal trial or hearing. The findings of the trial court declared the actions of the administrators violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s rights to due process.

The Bill of Rights came to be applied to state governments through the Fourteenth amendment. Originally the Bill of Rights limited powers to the national government. Many states had their own bill of rights and the fear lied in potential tyranny of the national government and not in the state governments. According to our textbook, for many decades the courts were hesitant on defining civil liberties spelled out in the national bill of rights as constituting “due process” of law under the fourteenth amendment. In 1925 the case of Gitlow v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled that the fourteenth amendment protected the freedom of speech guaranteed under the first amendment. Many protections of the bill of rights were included in the fourteenth

Contraceptives are widely used throughout the United States in today’s age and age, but in the early 1950s, Connecticut and Massachusetts were the only states in the union that still had anticontraception policies such as the 1879 Connecticut statute prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives (Johnson 6). Estelle Griswold accepted a job as executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and began a fight to give access for women to use contraceptives legally. It was very predictable the verdicts for the lower court cases during Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) as many judges took the side of the 1879 precedent. However, by the time it reached the Supreme Court, the main issue focused was the right to privacy which

The “Move to Amend” organization has put forth a proposed twenty-eighth amendment, that if ratified to the U.S. Constitution would take the constitutional rights away from all artificial entities such as corporations, and limit all campaign expenditures including the candidate 's own contributions and expenditures. The Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that according to the fourteenth amendment corporations are individuals that have constitutional rights. If corporations have the same rights as individuals, then under the first amendment they have the right to spend their money on political campaigns as they choose. I am against both parts of this proposed twenty-eighth amendment, the Supreme Court has already set precedence and I believe that the addition of this amendment would directly contradict the first amendment since political speech is at the core of the first amendment. If you set limits on campaign expenditures, you are limiting someone’s ability to effectively campaign and get their message out. If a corporation chooses to spend large sums of money on political advertising then that is their choice, most people don’t want to be told how they can spend their money and neither do corporations.

Every year people from all over the world come to the United States for a myriad of reasons. Some to seek employment, some education, and others to seek safe haven from violence and oppression from foreign governments. Regardless of the reason, the beauty of the United States is that the protections afforded by the constitution apply to anyone within its territory. However, since the terrorist attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, the protections of the constitution have since become a blurred line. Legislation such as the Patriot Act, and methods in which law enforcement conduct operations to combat terrorism have pushed the limits of the constitution. Finding the balance of working within the confines of the constitution is a constant challenge. The growing challenge elicits the potential for legal, policy and ethical issues, which ultimately undermine the very purpose of what the constitution is intended to protect.

Direct democracy is a government in which the people directly elect their officials, and vote on the laws which govern them. When a nation has a representative democracy, the people’s officials are elected to act in their stead (Text Pg. 24). The politicians are empowered by the people to govern and pass laws. A constitutional democracy is one in that the politicians are representatives of the people (Text Pg. 21). The politicians acknowledge that there are limitations on their power, and that the people are sovereign.

It is well known that the United States have been seen internationally as a key actor, for better or worse, when it comes to the field of universal human rights. At the same time, recent events have shown a disassociation between the words and actions of the nation. Despite the fact that these rights are supposed to be constitutionally-protected, the United States has been criticized for repeatedly violating them not only in the past but in recent memory: criminalization of poverty and homelessness, violation of the privacy of citizens all over the world, racism, police brutality, the prison-for-profit system, mistreatment or even torture of the prisoners. These are just some examples of the most common forms of human rights violations

Most people believe that they deserve the rights they are granted by the government. A prime example of this is the right to do what you want with your body, as long as you don’t hurt anybody else. This is considered a basic human right and is provided for in the constitution. One example of where you should be able to do whatever you want with your body is prostitution. The government always has too much power over our health. It can draft us and make us go into internment camps like the Japanese in WW2. It certainly shouldn’t say whether or not we have the right to pay for sex with a consenting adult.

Many people are not aware of their own rights, let along the fact that there are rights for victims. Before this class, I knew of a couple rights for victims, but not very many. I was uneducated in this area. For a long period of history, victims’ rights were not recognized, because they were not seen as necessary. Now there are thirty-two states that have added an amendment to their state constitutions including the rights of victims. However, these laws are not perfect. They do not apply to all victims of all crimes, and they do not always specify at what point after the crime these laws go into affect. In fact, only about half of the country affords rights to all victims, regardless of the crime. This number is too absolutely too low, but because people in general are unaware of this, there is no movement for change.

Here in America, people have the right to protest and speak their views granted by the first Amendment in their Constitution. Reading or watching the news lately, there are a lot of protests happening. People are gathering and protesting so many different things all over the world right now and America is no different. However, what the media shows in America are arrests of protestors by security and police, both of which attack them at times, using pepper spray and other brutal methods. How is this behavior allowed? Pauline Maier sums up what the issue at hand is, “The affection with which Americans regard the three “founding documents” of the United States has not been constant over time.” (Maier pg3). American protestors are at times fighting for equal rights as equal citizens. While many others are asking for justice due to corruption in Wall Street, Banks, and American Government; however, the people who don’t hold affection for the first Amendment have been shown in the media as an increasingly violent force against those who support it. Should people be allowed to protest regardless of their cause, and without any execution of force unless provoked? I believe they should have this right and be guaranteed safety in acting on it. With these ideas in mind, America’s first Amendment is being contradicted by US government authority and private authority figures because these same people have enacted numerous assaults on people using their first amendment rights.

constitutional rights. Prison is not a fun place to be even for the most harden criminals, and a correctional system is not an arena for solving the underlying causes of crime. Some states are facing severe budget cuts due to economic struggles and drops in tax revenues; therefore, not all prison facilities in the United States could offer rehabilitation, education, mental health services, and sanitary cells for convicted offenders.

I am advocating for ending the “One Person, One Vote” method of voting on referendums and for candidates that is currently employed in the United States of America. The One Person, One Vote strategy, henceforth referred to as 1p1v, has several key flaws that have made it an unfair and often inefficient method of deciding what the best decision with the largest net social product, or who the candidate most intensely supported by constituents, truly is. Making collective decisions based on majority rule is an idea as old as democracy, and in theory, it seems like the right idea. The idea of proportional and equal voting just seems, fair, doesn’t it? However, the issue with majority rule is that the majority can completely disregard the justifiable and well-founded interests of the minority. This problem is known as “Tyranny of the majority”. The current 1p1v system that we have in place has proven to allow the tyranny of the majority to take place from issues as petty as marijuana legalization, to incredibly important issues like same-sex marriage. The 1p1v system fails to give proportional weight to those with greater interest in an issue, leading to inequality. But if the 1p1v system does not work, and the entire voting system must be restructured to ensure fairness and equality, where do we go from here? It is well known that the most important issue to Americans is the economy , so I believe we should model our government and method of voting after the one institution that