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93 Supreme Court Research Topics & Essay Examples

📝 supreme court research papers examples, 💡 essay ideas on supreme court, ❓ supreme court research questions.

• Gay Marriage and the U.S Supreme Court Law essay sample: The same-sex marriages created implications regarding procedural elements in the American criminal justice system due to the tax matter that formed the basis.
• Supreme Court and the Federal Court System Law essay sample: The US Supreme Court is the highest court on the land charged with the responsibility of interpreting important questions about the constitution.
• Antonin Scalia, an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Law essay sample: Scalia was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1986 to 2016, his career life began at an international law firm located in Cleveland.
• Legal Brief: U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in Maryland v. Pringle Law essay sample: According to the research, there were found 5 plastic baggies with a substance that was identified as cocaine.
• Supreme Court of the United States: Marbury v. Madison Law essay sample: The case Marbury v. Madison was one of the most important cases in American law history since it introduced the power of judicial review.
• Freedom of Speech and Related Supreme Court Cases Law essay sample: Some examples from history were when the Court, in the case of Brown against the Board of Education, decided that the division of education institutions by race is not fair.
• Supreme Court Case: Terminiello v. Chicago Law essay sample: In Terminiello v. Chicago case, the appellant was Father Arthur Terminiello and the respondents were Chicago, Illinois courts, Robert H. Jackson, and the Chicago police.
• Supreme Court on Native American Adoption Law Law essay sample: This paper discusses the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 and the controversy surrounding its constitutionality, which led to lower court decisions declaring it unconstitutional.
• The Roper v. Simmons Case Analysis Law essay sample: Whether the execution of a person who was 17 years old when he executed a murder is prohibited under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments?
• Florida v. Harris and Florida v. Jardines Cases Comparison Law essay sample: The cases of Florida v. Harris and Florida v. Jardines share some similarities. However, several peculiarities create a definite distinction between the two.
• The Charkaoui v. Canada Supreme Court Case Law essay sample: The Supreme Court of Canada issued a decision in Charkaoui v. Canada about the legality of procedures for determining the proportionality of a security certificate.
• Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Decision by the U.S. Supreme Court Law essay sample: After careful consideration, most judges decided that abortion is not a constitutional right and that no individual is given authority to regulate access to the matter.
• The Miranda vs. Arizona Case Decision Law essay sample: This paper discusses the case of Miranda vs. Arizona on whether the Supreme Court made the right decision in reversing the judgment.
• District of Columbia v. Heller: Rights to Possess Arms Law essay sample: District of Columbia v. Heller was one of the most significant decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court that influenced individuals’ rights to possess arms.
• The Bush vs. Gore Case in the Supreme Court Law essay sample: If the Supreme Court is to rule over a case such as Bush vs. Gore, the ruling issued should not form part of the precedence to rely on when providing judgment.
• Hernandez v. Texas Case: Discrimination Charges Against Indigenous Peoples Law essay sample: The case Hernandez v. Texas, which occurred on May 3, 1954, defined how the American legal system handles discrimination charges against indigenous peoples.
• Change in Role of Supreme Court Over Time Law essay sample: The Supreme Court is the most powerful in the country and hears all issues and disagreements relating to other American laws and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
• Immigration Law: The Biden v. Texas Case Law essay sample: The recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Biden v. Texas, 597 U.S., was a hallmark for immigration laws in the U.S
• The Role of the Supreme Court in Shaping Legal Precedent
• Key Landmark Decisions of the Supreme Court
• The Supreme Court and Parental Rights Termination
• Judicial Review: Understanding the Supreme Court’s Power
• U.S Supreme Court vs. Constitutional Right to Carry a Handgun
• The Evolution of the Supreme Court: Past to Present
• Supreme Court Nominations: Impact on Legal Landscape
• American Political System and Supreme Court Reform The United States of America is one of the oldest democracies in the world. It is an election-driven and representative federal democracy.
• Balancing Act: The Supreme Court and the Constitution
• The Supreme Court in the Judiciary System of the USA
• Socio-Political Importance of the US Supreme Court
• The Significance of Supreme Court Dissents
• Supreme Court Jurisdiction: Boundaries and Scope
• The Supreme Court’s Role in Safeguarding Civil Liberties
• Supreme Court and the Separation of Powers Doctrine
• The Supreme Court and the History of Reconstruction The article focuses on the connection between the views of historians on Reconstruction and Supreme Court jurisprudence.
• Legal Interpretation: Methods Employed by the Supreme Court
• Selecting Judges for the Supreme Court: Appointing vs. Electing
• The Most Important Bankruptcy Supreme Court Cases
• Supreme Court Scrutiny: The CSI Effect and Its Jurisprudential Implications
• The Politicization of Supreme Court Confirmations
• Presidential Appointments of Supreme Court Justices
• Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights: A Historical Perspective
• The Supreme Court’s Impact on Social Change
• Supreme Court and Federalism: Examining State vs. Federal Powers
• The Constitution and the US Supreme Court The Supreme Court has created a significant collection of judicial opinions, or precedents following the Constitution.
• Discussing Justice Term Limits on the Supreme Court
• The Supreme Court’s Methods of Interpreting the Constitution
• Judicial Independence: The Supreme Court as a Check and Balance
• Supreme Court and Electoral Law: Key Cases and Issues
• The Influence of Public Opinion on Supreme Court Decisions
• Supreme Court Dynamics: Balancing Judicial Activism vs. Judicial Restraint
• The Supreme Court’s Role in Resolving Constitutional Conflicts
• Supreme Court and Due Process: Protecting Individual Rights
• Antitrust Policy and Mergers: The Wealth Effect of Supreme Court Decisions
• The Role of the Supreme Court in Ensuring Equal Justice
• Examining the Supreme Court Appointments: Life-Long Impact Appointing a Supreme Court Justice is an significant process for the government of the United States because it holds tremendous power over the future development of the state.
• Supreme Court and the Evolving Definition of Free Speech
• Judicial Activism vs. Judicial Restraint: Supreme Court Perspectives
• The Approval Process of Supreme Court Justice
• The Supreme Court of the U.S This work describes the history of the formation of the US Supreme Court, its basic legislative framework and the current court format.
• Supreme Court and Religious Freedom: Key Cases
• The Supreme Court’s Influence on Criminal Justice Policies
• Supreme Court and Technology: Navigating the Digital Age
• The Supreme Court’s Role in Defining Marriage Equality
• What Is the Crucial Role of the Supreme Court in Upholding the Constitution?
• Should Supreme Court Justices Have Term Limits?
• How Does the Supreme Court Employ Various Methods in the Interpretation of Legal Matters?
• What Is the Purpose of the Length of the Term for a Supreme Court Justice?
• In What Ways Has the Supreme Court Evolved From Its Inception to the Present Day?
• How Do Supreme Court Nominations Impact the Overall Legal Landscape?
• Why Are Dissents Considered Significant Within the Context of Supreme Court Decisions?
• In What Ways Does the Canadian Supreme Court Differ From the US Supreme Court?
• How Do Supreme Court Decisions Give Power to the States?
• What Are the Jurisdictional Boundaries and Scope of the Supreme Court’s Authority?
• Are US Supreme Court Justices Politically Biased?
• How Does the Supreme Court Navigate the Delicate Balance of Powers Between Branches of Government?
• What Methods Does the Supreme Court Use to Interpret Legal Matters?
• Should the Number of Supreme Court Justices Be Increased?
• What Is the Minimum Age to Be a Judge of the Supreme Court?
• How Does the Supreme Court Contribute to the Development of Legal Precedent?
• What Is the Historical Perspective of the Supreme Court’s Involvement in Upholding the Bill of Rights?
• How Many Members Are in the Supreme Court?
• Can the Supreme Court Make a Decision That Violates the US Constitution?
• What Is the Main Function of the Supreme Court?
• How Has the Supreme Court Interpreted the Second Amendment?
• In What Ways Has the Supreme Court Contributed to Social Change Through Its Decisions?
• Which US President Also Served on the Supreme Court?
• How Does the Supreme Court Impact Electoral Laws, Citing Key Cases and Issues?
• What Are the Landmark Judgements of the Supreme Court of India?
• How Does the Supreme Court Ensure Due Process and Protect Individual Rights?
• Does the President Have Power Over the Supreme Court?
• What Influence Does Public Opinion Have on the Decisions Rendered by the Supreme Court?
• Should Supreme Court Justices Be Elected Instead of Appointed?
• What Is the Difference Between the High Court and the Supreme Court?

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LawBirdie. (2024, February 14). 93 Supreme Court Research Topics & Essay Examples. https://lawbirdie.com/topics/supreme-court-research-topics/

"93 Supreme Court Research Topics & Essay Examples." LawBirdie , 14 Feb. 2024, lawbirdie.com/topics/supreme-court-research-topics/.

LawBirdie . (2024) '93 Supreme Court Research Topics & Essay Examples'. 14 February.

LawBirdie . 2024. "93 Supreme Court Research Topics & Essay Examples." February 14, 2024. https://lawbirdie.com/topics/supreme-court-research-topics/.

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LawBirdie . "93 Supreme Court Research Topics & Essay Examples." February 14, 2024. https://lawbirdie.com/topics/supreme-court-research-topics/.

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Supreme Court Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

• Questioning and Criticizing Supreme Court Nominees
• Comparison of US Supreme Court Decisions
• U.S. Supreme Court Operation
• Case Brief on Reynolds v. Sims
• As Supreme Court Reconvenes, Civil Rights Issues In The Fore
• Roe vs Wade Ruling – the Result of the Supreme Court
• Supreme Court in the United States
• Prima Facie Case: Home Country v. Foreign Country
• Supreme Court in Israel
• Oral Arguments and Decision-making on the Supreme Court
• The New Deal and the Role of the Supreme Court
• Analysis: “Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role” by Emmett Macfarlane
• Supreme Court Ruling: The Louisiana Purchase
• The Supreme Court Role in Canadian Politics
• Brown vs. Plata Case and Supreme Court’s Decision
• Obergefell v. Hodge: Supreme Court Case
• Supreme Court in New York Times Co. v. United States
• US Supreme Court’s Ideological Tendencies
• Criminal Cases in the Supreme Court’s Jurisdiction

Good Essay Topics on Supreme Court

• The Supreme Court of the United States
• Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case
• Supreme Court Decisions that Affect Victim Handing
• Constitutional Law: Supreme Court and Stare Decisis
• The Supreme Court Saves Cell Phone Privacy
• Relationship Between the Supreme Court and the High Court Justice
• President’s Power in Supreme Court Cases
• Forensic Science and Law: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Decision in Daubert
• Appeal Process in the Supreme Court in the U.S
• Supreme Court and Local Governments
• Supreme Court Decision: Corporations and Freedom of Speech
• Supreme Court’s Interpretation of Democracy
• Supreme Court: The Case Research
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg Documentary of Supreme Court Justice
• Supreme Court Decision in the US vs. Bass Case of 2001
• The Introduction of the New British Supreme Court
• People v. O’Neil Supreme Court Decision
• Case Brief, Based on the Supreme Court: State V Hoying W L

Strategic Analysis Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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138 Court Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on court, ✍️ court essay topics for college, 👍 good court research topics & essay examples, 📌 easy court essay topics, 🎓 most interesting court research titles, 💡 simple court essay ideas.

• Dual Court System: Advantages and Disadvantages
• Crimes Against Humanity by International Criminal Court
• The Lucy v. Zehmer Court Case Review
• The Courtroom: The Role Participants in a Court
• The Riley v. California Supreme Court Case Brief
• Case Notes on Court: Stockland Development Pty Ltd v Manly Council
• Texas vs. Johnson: Landmark of US Supreme Court
• Dual Court System in the United States The purpose of this article is to consider the principle of the functioning of the dual judicial system in the United States.
• The Court of Law: Merits and Difficulties The court of law is one of the pillars of the democratic system. This is why it is very important that the judges and other court members deliver the most justice they can.
• Landmark Court Cases in Digital Communication The paper examines three landmark cases in digital communication comprising United States v. Anderson (2014), Fort Wayne Books v. Indiana (1989), and California v. FCC (1988).
• Court Systems of the United States The US has two primary court systems: State and Federal courts. The dual court system has a significant impact on the process of trial and diverse aspects of the legislation.
• Disempowerment of Women in King Arthur’s Court Thomas Malory belongs to those writers who managed to depict the disempowerment of women without focusing on the problem of racial discrimination alone.
• The Case of Camara vs. Municipal Court This paper analyzes the case of Camara vs. Municipal court and whether the fourth amendment applies in this case.
• Supreme Court Decision Research Paper The Supreme Court’s decisions have great importance in legal practice and often become precedents determining how future cases are to be decided.
• Veterans Court Designing: Three Crucial Stages The work discusses the types of treatment you to mandate, addressing problems with compliance, and other support you needed when designing Veterans court.
• Somalia v. Kenya: International Court of Justice The case that will be analyzed is Somalia v. Kenya. It is one of the contentious cases heard by the International Court of Justice.
• Geriatric Court: Pros and Cons Establishing a distinct system for the elderly, often known as a geriatric court, is one option to address a variety of social issues.
• Court Cases that Address Prosecutors Ethics A prosecutor is a person who represents a state in criminal cases in courts of law, he or she is responsible for executing a criminal who has broken a law.
• Supreme Court Case Matal v. Tam and The First Amendment The First Amendment is an important normative act that helps attribute trademarks to the objects of cultural or commercial expression but not to official state messages.
• The Hierarchy of the Court System in England and Wales This study assesses the hierarchy of the court system in England and Wales. It also seeks to determine how the common law doctrine of binding precedent interacts with the order.
• Eyewitness Testimony and Its Reliability in the Law Court A citizen becomes a witness due to an accidental combination of circumstances, but his or her role in criminal proceedings is significant since the witness is indispensable.
• The Sekmadienis Ltd. v. Lithuania Court Case Sekmadienis Ltd. v. Lithuania concerned a lawsuit filed by the Lithuanian Government against the advertising company.
• Puerto Rico Court System Puerto Rico’s judicial system currently comprises of the Supreme Court, which is the highest court in the region and also mandated to direct the entire judicial system.
• The United States vs. Trump Supreme Court Case Investigations on Trump’s conduct have led to numerous cases in court, including stealing classified documents from the White House and storing them in Mar-a-Lago.
• Breyer on the Supreme Court’s Fundamental Role In “Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s Views, ” Stephen Breyer, a Supreme Court justice, outlines how the justice system’s US Constitution should work.
• Family Court-Ordered Mediation: Violence Family Court-Ordered Mediation is not suitable for the victims of domestic abuse, parents with mental illnesses or addictions, and in cases of child neglect.
• The Milbanke Court vs. Grantley House Lease Agreement The article delves into the complexities of lease agreements and the legal aspects related to various properties to provide a comprehensive overview of leasing practices.
• The Impact of Supreme Court Decisions on the US Economy High-profile U.S. Supreme Court decisions have underscored the role and importance of the Constitution and underpinned many economic tendencies.
• Court Cases That Impacted to Death Penalty Daryl Atkins, who has an IQ of 59, was found guilty of murdering an Air Force enlisted man inside a convenience shop and was sentenced to death for his crime.
• Analysis of Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Case Study Since the Supreme Court’s Roe V. Wade ruling in 1973, around one out of every three pregnancies has resulted in abortion that’s why it is one of difficult and contentious problems.
• The U.S. Supreme Court Election System The elections of the US Supreme Court members are politicized and ideologized, which is incompatible with democratic values and contrary to the Constitution.
• The Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case Analysis Loving v. Virginia was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that legalized interracial marriage nationwide.
• Ricci v. DeStefano: Supreme Court Case The paper discusses the Ricci v. DeStefano court matter. A group of African Americans could not get a promotion which they filed as racism in the workplace.
• International Criminal Court and Its Importance International Criminal Court presents a permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for various international crimes.
• Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling Sets Off New Court Fights The article discusses the Supreme Court’s decision to ban abortions and give states the right to decide on their local level whether they want to prohibit it or not.
• The Supreme Court in Lifetime Appointment A lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court is not a beneficial approach for the modern age, and it cannot effectively prevent undue influence over the Justices.
• How the US Supreme Court Affected Japanese Americans Some Japanese Americans refused to relocate to internment camps during World War II, and they also challenged government orders to do so in court.
• The Supreme Court and the American Constitution The paper looks upon Constitutional provisions and Supreme Court’s rulings and discusses the impact they had on American life.
• A Court Case That Influenced Federal Decision on Gun Control The case of plaintiff George Young, who sues the state and county for denying him an application for a license for carrying a handgun in public for personal defense.
• Gun-Carry Rules Bar Jail, Court Retirees A recent case documented by O’Connor shows how the federal courts have barred retired officers from carrying guns despite being permitted to do so by the law.
• “Miranda v. Arizona” Supreme Court Ruling The Supreme Court landmark case “Miranda v. Arizona” was decided in 1966. The ruling pertains to the fifth and sixth constitutional amendments.
• Introduction of Information Technologies in Court Introducing AI and IT technologies in court will significantly increase the technological aspect of justice and its accessibility.
• Stare Decisis and the Principle’s Role in Court Cases Stare decisis is a doctrine that is based on courts following previously covered cases with the aim of increasing efficiency throughout the process.
• Whren v. the United States, 517 US 806 – Supreme Court 1996 Whren’s motion says that the search of the car in which he was a passenger by officers in an unmarked car was a violation of the 4th Amendment.
• The Brown vs. Board of Education Case: Supreme Court Decision This paper will analyze the Supreme Court’s decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case and discuss its implications for civil rights.
• Canadian Court and Sex Offences This paper focuses on investigating three main factors that may prevent or complicate judicial proceedings regarding sex offense cases.
• Historical Controversies of Supreme Court Justice Selection The selection of the new members of the Court is a complicated process that includes confirmation procedures from the President and the Senate.
• “Kelo v. New London”: Court Case Analysis This paper discusses the case “Kelo v. New London”, where this case was originally filed, what Constitutional issue is being raised, and when was oral argument heard.
• Court Decisions on Drug Offenders The research entails an investigation into the variables that influence the sentencing decisions of judges in drug offenders’ cases.
• The Impact of Race on Court Decisions The main question of the paper is whether white people and people of color, women and men, rich and poor, young and old, receive the same punishment for the same crime.
• Supreme Court’s Marbury v. Madison (1803) Case Marbury v. Madison remains a landmark and relevant ruling today for the Supreme Court because the ruling established the doctrine of judicial review.
• Abortions. Perspectives, Federalism, Court Cases Abortion has been one of the most provocative topics across the globe. People have different views on whether a woman should be permitted to abort her child or not.
• Supreme Court Ruling on Affordable Care Act This paper describes the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court about the ACA. The paper also discusses personal views on the constitutionality of the ACA.
• Loving vs. Virginia: The Supreme Court Case Loving vs. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967) is a historic decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a controversial one that pushed along reform in the United States.
• Workplace Discrimination Laws: Court Case Employers who terminate their workers on the basis of their sexual orientation break the law by violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• “Supreme Court Justices Question…” Article by R. Rubin The reviewed article is titled “Supreme Court Justices Question IRS Shield in Tax-Shelter Case,” and it was posted in The Wall Street Journal on December 1, 2020, by Richard Rubin.
• The Discriminations Based on Significant Court Cases This paper analyzes the differences in the approaches taken to remedy each of the discriminations based on significant court cases.
• Case Notes on Court: BGP Properties Pty Limited v Lake Macquarie City Council This current case study is about an application filed by BGP Properties Limited against Lake Macquarie City Council.
• Supreme Court Judgeship Appointment Process This paper examines the appointment process and confirming a Supreme Court justice comprising of two main steps – nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate.
• Attending Court: Personal Experiences On 23rd February 2011, I attended a bail hearing of an accused police constable who shot and killed a 26-year-old man. The hearing took place in Ontario.
• Lifetime Appointment for the Supreme Court Justices This proposal is motivated by assuming that current Supreme Court Justices are much older and have held office much longer than before.
• Overturning Supreme Court’s Decision on Evenwel v. Abbott and Trump v. Hawaii Evenwel v. Abbott and Trump v. Hawaii are Supreme Court cases in which America’s highest ability to use cumulative population when redistricting and Trump’s immigration policy.
• State and Federal Court Systems in the United States This paper describes the typical state court system and compares it with the federal court, their authority, and current systematic problems of their work.
• Tinker v. Des Moines: Court Proceeding Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District is a historic Supreme Court Ruling that set the standard for school authorities about implementing policies.
• The United States Criminal Court System The systems approach involves the coordination of all the concerned parties, i.e. the law enforcers, correction agencies, and courts.
• Processes that Entail a Juvenile Court The author of this letter writes to someone’s person in order to make that person understand the processes that entail a juvenile court.
• Derivative Lawsuit: The Laws and Court Cases This paper aims to discuss the laws and court cases regulating shareholder derivative lawsuits in the United Kingdom and examine if they have promoted business cultural responsibility.
• US Legal System and Court Experience The jury trial is a highly structured and orderly process that plays a crucial role in the American legal system.
• The Notion of the Supreme Court The following paper is the establishment of a correlation between the Supreme Court and the public as it is supposed to appear in terms of legal considerations.
• The People Jury Court on McNeese Prior to trial before a jury, McNeese was accused of committing a robbery using a deadly weapon. He had served an imprisonment term in the penitentiary at San Quentin.
• Juvenile Court Philosophy: the Parens Patriae Doctrine The Parens Patriae doctrine has become widely adopted in the juvenile system as advocates of such a system assert that juveniles are influenced by their developmental context.
• The International Criminal Court Jurisdiction The present position of the US towards joining the international criminal courts remains negative, and there are prospects that it may change with the new administration.
• Types of ADR and the Hearing Court The primary types of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods include mediation and arbitration. Mediation involves the use of a mediator to reach a settlement conflicts.
• Observations of the Virtual Crown Court and the Impact of COVID-19 on Trials The purpose of this paper is to compare theoretical ideas with the observations of the Virtual Crown Court and discuss how COVID-19 impacted the court trials.
• Psychologists’ Involvement in Civil Court Area Psychologists have varied interests within the civil court. Their involvement usually targets the examination of emotional elements associated with individual injury litigation.
• American Psychological Association’s View on Court Judgments According to American Psychological Association, it is crucial for the court to determine the risk of prospect hostility of an individual claimed before passing of judgment.
• Thurgood Marshall and His Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall was born in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland to William Marshall who worked as a railroad porter and mother an elementary school teacher.
• American Congress, President, and the Supreme Court In performing duties, Congress must keep in mind the interests of the people to ensure that the policies they make serve the best interest of the public.
• The American Supreme Court: Series of Evolution The American Supreme Court has gone through a series of evolutions over the years. Most of these evolutions have been on their composition, size and responsibilities.
• The United States Supreme Court Overview Congress and Justices of the Court are empowered by the constitution to develop the authorities and operations of the entire Judicial Branch of government.
• Supreme Court Decisions on First Amendment “Bill of Rights “is the first ten amendments made to the American constitution. However, the First Amendment is considered to be the most pivotal.
• Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education Case The decision of the Supreme Court in “Brown v. Board of Education“ has given the way for the desegregation of white and black in schools.
• American Democracy and Landmark Supreme Court Cases This essay ponders the key values of American democracy and describes landmark Supreme Court cases that have contributed to the formation of the political system.
• Life Terms and Limits of the Supreme Court Justice The paper concludes that the life terms practice should not be changed as it is integral to the existing political system and corresponds with the purpose of the Supreme Court.
• The US Supreme Court Jurisdiction Evolvement The U.S. Supreme Court represents one of the three branches of power that ensures the effective work of the system of checks and balances.
• Judicial Activism on the Supreme Court of Canada The article “Measuring Judicial Activism on the Supreme Court of Canada” encompasses the available empirical and quantitative evidence on judicial activism.
• Alternative Procedures Against Returns to Court The current use of bail needs to be revised with a focus on implementing updated procedures for controlling the return of defendants to courts.
• The Family Law Court System Functioning The operation of the judiciary in the sector of family law is crucial for the development of society. The complexity of family law is reflected in the absence of identical cases.
• Supreme Court: Miranda vs. Arizona Miranda v. Arizona is among the most notable Supreme Court cases that were decided in the second half of the twentieth century.
• History of the U.S. Supreme Court The U.S Supreme Court came into existence as per the requirement of the constitution. The USA constitution required that a supreme court is enacted to provide judicial power.
• Expert Testimony Usage in a Court of Law The present paper has used DNA and insider trading cases to illuminate important concepts associated with the use of expert testimony in a court of law.
• US Workplace and Race Discrimination Court Cases The present paper analyzes two court cases to demonstrate important concepts associated with workplace discrimination.
• The Supreme Court Justice Warren Earl Burger’ Biography This research paper covers the life and times of the Supreme court Justice Warren Earl Burger. This research paper is based on a literature review.
• Supreme Court’s and Habeas Corpus War on Terror Since the principles, which the war on terror is based by, are entirely against the postulates of habeas corpus, these postulates should be integrated into the process of combating the terrorists.
• Supreme Court Justice: Homosexual Marriages The question of homosexual relations and untraditional marriages remains to be open for a long period of time. It is hard to make all people choose the same position and stick to it all the time.
• The Supreme Court of the United States: Analysis The Supreme Court is the guardian of the Constitution, protecting its supremacy against the laws of the Centre or the State which conflict with or contravene with its provisions.
• Factors That Are Involved in the Nomination of Supreme Court Justices
• The Supreme Court and the Reproductive Rights
• New Jersey’s Court System – Examined at Every Level
• U.S. Supreme Court and the Death Penalty
• False Memories and Their Dangers in Court Cases
• European Court and Social Policy of the European Union
• The Supreme Court and American Society
• Bargaining and Opinion Assignment on the US Supreme Court
• Language Barriers and Lack of Interpreters in the Court Systems
• Judicial Review and the Role of the Court System
• U.S. Supreme Court and the Banking and Credit Union Conflict
• Immigration Reform and the Supreme Court Ruling
• Forensic Anthropology and the Criminal Court System
• Domestic Violence, Mental Health, and Family Court
• U.S. History and Government: Landmark Supreme Court Cases
• The Mandatory Mediation Program the Court Requires
• Campaign Finance Issues and the Us Supreme Court
• Discrimination and the War at Appomattox Court House
• Should the Supreme Court Legalized Gay Marriage
• Chief Justice John Marshall’s Supreme Court Influence
• The Potential Successes and Weaknesses of the African Court of Human Rights
• Newly Created Court System for Puerto Rico
• Supreme Court Rights Override Legislative
• Universalizability and Philippine Supreme Court Cases
• Crime Victimization Survey and Juvenile Court Statistics
• The United States Lends Credibility to the International Criminal Court
• Social Work and the Juvenile Court System
• American Court System: Court Designs and Functions
• Abortion United States Supreme Court in 1973
• The State Court System in the State of Washington
• Gender Discrimination During the Supreme Court
• The Court System and the Law of Great Britain
• The Turkish Constitutional Court, Laicism and the Headscarf Issue
• Comparison and Critical Appraisal of the English Court System
• The Many Issues Surrounding the Supreme Court in the United States
• Political Influence Over Supreme Court Criminal Procedure Cases
• Analysis of the New Mexico Judiciary
• Health Care Reform and the Supreme Court
• Public Opinion and Supreme Court Decision
• The Criminal Law and the United States Supreme Court on the Case Atkins Versus Virginia in 2002
• Adversarial vs. Inquisitorial Court Systems
• Supreme Court Sentence Four to Death for Roger Whetmore’s Murder

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StudyCorgi. (2022, January 16). 138 Court Essay Topics. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/court-essay-topics/

"138 Court Essay Topics." StudyCorgi , 16 Jan. 2022, studycorgi.com/ideas/court-essay-topics/.

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StudyCorgi . "138 Court Essay Topics." January 16, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/court-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "138 Court Essay Topics." January 16, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/court-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Court were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 5, 2024 .

93 Bill of Rights Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best bill of rights topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 simple & easy bill of rights essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on bill of rights, ❓ bill of rights essay questions.

• The Bill of Rights: Principles and Elements It contains different elements like the bill of rights, the principles of constitution, federalism, as well as the judicial review. The bill of rights takes into account the crucial rights of the people of a […]
• Why Is the Bill of Rights Important Today Essay The bill of rights is one of the basic provisions of a given constitution and it spells out the rights and freedoms of all the citizens of a given nation. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Analysis of Case Laws Involving Business and the Bill of Rights, Torts, Administrative Agency and Contracts Ruling: The criminal court of appeals of Texas held that the evidence was sufficient in establishing that the appellant knew the content and character of the video tape and thus affirmed the conviction.
• Bill of Rights and Individual Liberties Enemies of the constitution played down the claim that the bill of rights was not needed in the constitution since it contravened the wishes and desires of the majority in the country.
• Analysis of «Bill of Rights» Through the bill of rights, an individual is assured of a number of personal freedoms, including the right to own property, the right to life, right of protection from the law, freedom of movement, freedom […]
• Thomas Jefferson and the Writing of the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution The important nature of the Declaration of Independence cannot be overstated; it was through the statement that the 13 colonies in America declared their independence from the British Empire.
• The Bill of Rights and the Anti-Federalist Concerns The Effects of the Bill of Rights Due to these facts and the essence of the Bill of Rights, it can be said that the efforts of the Anti-Federalists were not in vain.
• American History: A Bill of Rights and an Amendment A bill of rights outlines the rights and privileges of the citizens while an amendment aims at making changes to the existing legal provisions that govern a state or country.
• The Bill of Rights and It’s Importance Each of the amendments included in this list is critical for limiting the authority of the state. This is one of the reasons why I attach much importance to this amendment that regulates the interactions […]
• Amendment Four in the US Bill of Rights The fourth amendment in the United States of America Constitution is the section of the Bill of Rights that protects all US citizens against unfair searches, confiscations, and arrests.
• Should Australia Adopt a Bill of Rights? Victorian Charter of Human Rights/Responsibility Act of 2006 is important, because it addresses the following.”By drawing the nexus between policies and practices with human rights standards, the Charter becomes a powerful tool that changes the […]
• Procedural Law and the Bill of Rights Though being only parts of the grand system, the Procedural Law and the Bill of Rights create the environment in which handling the issues occurring in the legal field of the U.S.becomes a possibility.
• Justifying the Bill of Rights: the US Constitution The constitution depends upon the process of amendment to guarantee personal freedom and the nature of the adaptability of the constitution.
• The Bill of Rights, Its Origins and Historic Role Therefore, while formulating the text of the document, the legislators proceeded from the idea of natural rights and freedoms and the establishment of the limits of the state’s power in relation to a person.
• Patient Bill of Rights: Policy Analysis The patient is provided with rights and responsibilities so that they are not misled by the doctors and thus the health plan should adopt the principles that will enable them to provide the best services […]
• Similarities and Differences Between the English Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence The document, the English Bill of Rights, was ratified in the year 1689 by the English parliament. The American Declaration of Independence, like the English Bill of Rights, safeguarded the right of subjects to participate […]
• Creation of Constitution and Bill of Rights The Articles of Confederation failed to unify the nation because in this document, the empowerment of the government of the United States was utterly limited.
• Policing and the Bill of Rights: Supreme Court Cases Jones case, the placement of a GPS device under a suspect’s car was interpreted as a violation of the Fourth amendment by the Supreme Court. In the United States v.
• The Bill of Rights Application to the Law Enforcement System The initial version of the United States Constitution included the provisions that granted authority to the three independent branches of government: the legislative, the judicial, and the executive.
• Fundamental Rights in the Bill of Rights This paper examines the extent to which the Bill of Rights has influenced the way of life of the people of America in line with the Constitution.
• English Bill of Rights vs. American Declaration of Independence In a sense, the American constitution is the fruition of the struggle of the people to dispense with the monarchy and privileged aristocracy and it is the voice of an authentic Republic.
• The Bill of Rights and the Florida Constitution The Constitution of the state of Florida is similar to the bill of rights, yet distinct in a variety of freedoms and protections it offers.
• The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction Living in the shadow of the second Reconstruction of the 1960s, several lawyers adhere to a custom that perceives federal authorities and state officials as the unique protectors of independent and minority rights as the […]
• Historical Backgrounds, Constitution, Bill of Rights and Amendments
• The Freedom for Individuals Provided and Protected by the Bill of Rights
• English Principles and Their Influence for Colonial Government: The English Bill of Rights
• Substantive Due Process, Procedural Due Process and the Bill of Rights
• Immigration and the Bill of Rights – The Fundamental Constitutional Protections
• Bill of Rights and Evolution American Government
• The Relationship Between Man and Religion Through the Bill of Rights
• Indigenous Women and the Canadian Bill of Rights
• Civil Liberties’ Protection and the U.S. Bill of Rights
• The Revolution and the Bill of Rights
• Founding Fathers and the Bill of Rights – A Brief History
• Business and the Bill of Rights – How the Constitution Protects the Civil Liberties of Business Entities
• The Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The Fourteenth Amendment and Bill of Rights That Changed History
• Salem Witch Trials and the Bill of Rights
• A Bill of Rights And Democracy in South Africa
• Gun Control and the Bill of Rights: The Origins of the Second Amendment and the Right to Bear Arms
• Criminal Justice: The Bill of Rights and Court Cases
• Individual Rights and Freedoms Under the Bill of Rights
• The Content and Importance of the Amendments to the United States Bill of Rights
• The History, Role and Impact of the Bill of Rights in the U.s
• The Federal Police Officers and Bill of Rights
• From the Italian Renaissance to the American Bill of Rights
• Arguments for and Against an Australian Bill of Rights
• British Bill of Rights and the Human Rights
• America and the Incorporation of the Bill of Rights
• Impartial Government and the U.S. Bill of Rights
• The American Constitution, the Bill of Rights – The Most Important Amendments
• Constitutional and Administrative Reasons Behind the Bill of Rights
• The Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights, and Philosophers
• Protecting Life, Liberty, and Property in the Bill of Rights
• Modern Day Relevance of the Bill of Rights
• The Pros and Cons of the Bill of Rights in the Way to Become a More Rights-Focused Society
• The Magna Carta and Bill of Rights: A Step Forward
• To Be Secure – The 4th Amendment and the Bill of Rights
• The Various Liberties Identified in the Bill of Rights: What Liberty Should Be Added to the Bill of Rights
• Public Opinion and the Us Bill of Rights: 1st and 2nd Amendments
• Three Most Important Documents in the History of the U.S. – The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence
• The United States Bill of Rights and the Texas Bill of Rights
• Law and Order: Procedural Law and the Bill of Rights
• What Is the Purpose of a Bill of Rights?
• How Did the Fourteenth Amendment and Bill of Rights Change History?
• Why Is the Passage of the Bill of Rights an Example of Compromise, Friendship, and Moderation?
• How Did the Magna Carta Influence the Bill of Rights?
• How Did the Bill of Rights Become Part of the Constitution? Were All of the Proposed Changes Accepted?
• What Was the Original Founding Understanding of the Bill of Rights?
• Why Was the Bill of Rights Added to the Constitution?
• What Rights Are Protected by the First Amendment?
• When Did the Bill of Rights Become a More Central Part of How the Constitution Is Interpreted? Why?
• Which Freedoms Are Protected by the Bill of Rights? Which Ones Do You Use Regularly or Rarely?
• How Does Citizens-Not the Government-Use the Bill of Rights to Define Their Freedoms?
• What Would Life Be Like Without a Bill of Rights?
• What Are the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Federalists’ Arguments?
• Why Did the Bill of Rights Not Strongly Affect Citizens?
• What Are the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Antifederalists’ Arguments?
• Should the Bill of Rights Be Updated? If So, What Rights Should Be Added or Amended?
• What’s an Example of a Natural Right That Is Not Referenced in the Bill of Rights?
• Why Do You Think the Founding Fathers Included the Bill of Rights?
• What Rights Are Promised to American Citizens in the Bill of Rights?
• Why Might Some of the Federalists Have Opposed the Adoption of a Bill of Rights? What Problems Might It Cause?
• What Arguments Did the Anti-federalists Make in Favor of the Bill of Rights? How Convincing Do You Find Those Arguments?
• Why Did Several States Refuse to Ratify the Constitution Without the Addition of the Bill of Rights?
• What Is the Primary Purpose of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
• How Did North Carolina Federalists and Anti-federalists View the United States Constitution in 1788?
• What Consequences Might We Face if We Are Unaware of the Bill of Rights?
• Do You Think We Would Have A Bill of Rights Without the Anti-federalists?
• How Do the Bill of Rights Affect Our Individual Lives?
• What Would Happen Without the Bill of Rights?
• Is the Bill of Rights Necessary? Why or Why Not?
• Why Should the Bill of Rights Be Added to the Constitution?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 93 Bill of Rights Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/bill-of-rights-essay-topics/

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IvyPanda . 2024. "93 Bill of Rights Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/bill-of-rights-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "93 Bill of Rights Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/bill-of-rights-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "93 Bill of Rights Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/bill-of-rights-essay-topics/.

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Constitutional Topics

Kennedy v. bremerton school district.

597 U.S. __ (2022)

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

597 U.S. ___ (2022)

Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo

592 U. S. __ (2020)

Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru

591 U.S. __ (2020)

Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue

Carpenter v. united states.

585 U.S. ___ (2018)

Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission

584 U.S.__ (2018)

Obergefell v. Hodges

576 U.S. ___ (2015)

Zivotofsky v. Kerry

Town of greece v. galloway.

572 U.S. 565 (2014)

Shelby County v. Holder

570 U.S. 529 (2013)

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius

567 U.S. 519 (2012)

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

558 U.S. 310 (2010)

District of Columbia v. Heller

554 U.S. 570 (2008)

Lawrence v. Texas

539 U.S. 558 (2003)

Bush v. Gore

531 U.S. 98 (2000)

Printz v. United States

521 U.S. 898 (1997)

Washington v. Glucksberg

521 U.S. 702 (1997)

United States v. Virginia

518 U.S. 515 (1996)

United States v. Lopez

514 U.S. 549 (1995)

Employment Division v. Smith

494 U.S. 872 (1990)

Texas v. Johnson

491 U.S. 397 (1989)

Morrison v. Olson

487 U.S. 654 (1988)

Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier

484 U.S. 260 (1988)

South Dakota v. Dole

483 U.S. 203 (1987)

Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.

467 U.S. 837 (1984)

Lynch v. Donnelly

465 U.S. 668 (1984)

Harlow v. Fitzgerald

457 U.S. 800 (1982)

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

438 U.S. 265 (1978)

United States v. Nixon (The Tapes Case)

418 U.S. 683 (1974)

Frontiero v. Richardson

411 U.S. 677 (1973)

Roe v. Wade

410 U.S. 113 (1973)

Wisconsin v. Yoder

406 U.S. 205 (1972)

New York Times Co. v. United States (The Pentagon Papers Case)

403 U.S. 713 (1971)

Brandenburg v. Ohio

395 U.S. 444 (1969)

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District

393 U.S. 503 (1969)

Terry v. Ohio

392 U.S. 1 (1968)

Katz v. United States

389 U.S. 347 (1967)

Loving v. Virginia

388 U.S. 1 (1967)

Miranda v. Arizona

384 U.S. 436 (1966)

South Carolina v. Katzenbach

383 U.S. 301 (1966)

Griswold v. Connecticut

381 U.S. 479 (1965)

United States v. Seeger

380 U.S. 163 (1965)

Reynolds v. Sims

377 U.S. 533 (1964)

New York Times Company v. Sullivan

376 U.S. 254 (1964)

Sherbert v. Verner

374 U.S. 398 (1963)

Gideon v. Wainwright

372 U.S. 335 (1963)

Engel v. Vitale

370 U.S. 421 (1962)

Mapp v. Ohio

367 U.S. 643 (1961)

Sweezy v. New Hampshire

354 U.S. 234 (1957)

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

347 U.S. 483 (1954)

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (Steel Seizure Case)

343 U.S. 579 (1952)

Terminiello v. Chicago

337 U.S. 1 (1949)

Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township

330 U.S. 1 (1947)

Korematsu v. United States

323 U.S. 214 (1944)

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

319 U.S. 624 (1943)

Wickard v. Filburn

317 U.S. 111 (1942)

Thornhill v. Alabama

310 U.S. 88 (1940)

Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins

304 U.S. 64 (1938)

United States v. Carolene Products Co.

304 U.S. 144 (1938)

West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish

300 U.S. 379 (1937)

Crowell v. Benson

285 U.S. 22 (1932)

Stromberg v. California

283 U.S. 359 (1931)

Olmstead v. United States

277 U.S. 438 (1928)

Whitney v. California

274 U.S. 357 (1927)

Gitlow v. New York

268 U.S. 652 (1925)

Pierce v. Society of Sisters

268 U.S. 510 (1925)

Abrams v. United States

250 U.S. 616 (1919)

Schenck v. United States

249 U.S. 47 (1919)

Lochner v. New York

198 U.S. 45 (1905)

United States v. Wong Kim Ark

169 U.S. 649 (1898)

Plessy v. Ferguson

163 U.S. 537 (1896)

Chinese Exclusion Case—Chae Chan Ping v. United States

130 U.S. 581 (1889)

The Civil Rights Cases

109 U.S. 3 (1883)

Strauder v. West Virginia

100 U.S. 303 (1880)

Reynolds v. United States

98 U.S. 145 (1879)

Minor v. Happersett

88 U.S. 162 (1875)

Bradwell v. The State of Illinois

83 U.S. 130 (1873)

The Slaughter-House Cases

83 U.S. 36 (1873)

Dred Scott v. Sandford

60 U.S. 393 (1857)

McCulloch v. Maryland

17 U.S. 316 (1819)

Marbury v. Madison

5 U.S. 137 (1803)

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Background Essay: The Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights

Guiding Question: How has the Supreme Court decided cases in controversies related to the Bill of Rights?

• I can identify the role of the Supreme Court in protecting civil liberties.
• I can explain how the Supreme Court’s role has changed over time.

Essential Vocabulary

During the last 60 years, the Supreme Court has become perhaps the central defender of civil liberties, or freedoms that government is not allowed to restrict, in the United States. This role has been a relatively recent development that marked a distinct change from the Founding, when the Court mostly addressed government powers. The evolution of this role for the Court has greatly expanded popular expectations of enjoying individual rights. However, it has also been fraught with numerous difficulties, both for the constitutional order and for the Supreme Court itself, as it has become the center of controversy about rights.

Limited Government and the Supreme Court

The original Founding understanding of the Bill of Rights was that it limited the powers of the federal government to violate the rights of the people. When originally ratified, the Bill of Rights only applied to the national government, not to state governments. State governments had their own bills of rights to protect their citizens. This reflected the constitutional principle of federalism, or the separation of powers between state and national governments. The Supreme Court endorsed this Founding view that the Bill of Rights applied only to the national government in the case Barron v. Baltimore (1833).

Moreover, this also represented the principle of limited government, one of the foundations of protecting liberties. The national government had certain enumerated and implied powers that the three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—exercised in making, executing, and interpreting the law. Enumerated powers are those listed explicitly in the Constitution. Implied powers are those that government has that are not written in the document. The national government could not exceed these powers to violate the liberties of the people. To further this protection, states had their own bills of rights. The Declaration of Independence asserted that the ultimate protection of the people’s liberties is the overthrow of a tyrannical government after a long train of abuses.

The role of the Court was to hear all cases arising under the Constitution. After the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Court’s role expanded to include determining the constitutionality of governmental laws and actions. However, there was debate over whether or not the other branches also had the responsibility of interpreting the Constitution.

It is important to note that although the Court could rule a law or action unconstitutional, it was not necessarily the final word on the Constitution. In a speech critical of the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, Abraham Lincoln quoted Andrew Jackson, saying, “The Congress, the executive and the court, must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.” Lincoln was arguing that the Court’s authority and just precedents , or earlier laws or rulings, should be respected, but the Supreme Court was not necessarily the final word on the meaning of the Constitution and could make errors, as it did in Dred Scott . All the branches must interpret the document in the exercise of their constitutional powers for the ends of liberty, equality, and justice.

The Supreme Court, Incorporation, and the Bill of Rights from the Twentieth Century to Today

The due process clause of the 14th Amendment led to the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, which meant that the Supreme Court applied the Bill of Rights to the states. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Court incorporated the Bill of Rights selectively in a few cases. For example, it extended the First Amendment right of free speech against state violation in Gitlow v. New York (1925) and freedom of the press in Near v. Minnesota (1931).

The popular understanding of the Court as the protector of individual rights became widely accepted during the Warren Court (1953–1969) and after. Many of the decisions were controversial because Americans viewed the issues involved differently. Some Americans questioned whether the Court was the appropriate branch to define rights or whether it should be left to the other branches of government or the amendment process. The Court also controversially overturned the laws and common values of states and local communities for one uniform, national standard.

The Court expanded the application of the Bill of Rights (incorporated) to the states in several areas and protected civil liberties in new ways. For example, the Court banned school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), respectively, for violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The Court protected the rights of students in local public schools in other ways. In Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), the Court decided that students had the right of free speech to protest the Vietnam War under the First Amendment. The students had worn black armbands to protest the war despite a warning not to, and the school suspended them.

The Court protected the rights of the accused in major cases during the mid-1960s. The Court stated that criminal defendants are entitled to an attorney in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). The Court excluded, or left out, illegally seized criminal evidence under the Fourth Amendment in Mapp v. Ohio (1964). In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court decided that police officers must provide a “Miranda warning” informing accused people of their rights before questioning them about a crime.

The Court also made key decisions on moral issues that were fiercely debated in American society. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court asserted that a “right to privacy” exists and is implicit in several amendments of the Bill of Rights. Therefore, the Court declared a state law banning birth control unconstitutional. The decision was a precedent for the use of the right to privacy argument in Roe v. Wade (1973), which established a right to abortion.

In recent decades, the Court helped protect gay rights. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Court invalidated state laws banning homosexual acts. In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court made gay marriage a right when it required states to recognize the same-sex marriages of other states.

The Supreme Court has left a mixed record regarding its decisions related to the Bill of Rights. On one hand, Court rulings have protected what seem like reasonable and fundamental individual liberties. On the other hand, the Court has made rulings on cultural, social, and moral disputes that often did little to resolve the wider debate over the issues and maybe even fueled division among Americans. In recent decades, for better or worse, Americans have increasingly looked to the Supreme Court as the protector of civil liberties and the final word on the Constitution.

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Supreme Court - Essays

The origins and legacy of justice marshall's "new rule" of conquest in johnson v. m'intosh.

Patricia Engle (January 2004)

 (1)    Johnson v. M'Intosh is a title dispute over a land parcel of some 12,000 acres in present-day southern Illinois.  The case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823, turned on the question of whether or not Indians had the right to transfer land title by sale to private citizens.  Like many cases that determined the rights of U.S. aboriginal peoples, the litigants were non-native whites.  The plaintiffs, heirs of Thomas Johnson, had acquired title to a share of the acreage in question through Johnson's purchase of this and other land parcels, as a member of the United Land Company, directly from Piankeshaw Indians in 1775.  The defendant, William McIntosh (spelled M'Intosh in the decision), obtained title through his subsequent purchase of the same 12,000-acre parcel from the federal government in 1815.  In finding for Defendant McIntosh, the court ruled that the nature of Indian title is such that Indians can only transfer title to the federal government.  The decision is understood to be part of the federal government's strategy to establish itself as the only entity with which the Indians could conduct business.  Johnson v. M'Intosh's greatest legal significance is its standing as the first of three cases known as the "Marshall trilogy" that work in combination to define Indian property rights, political status, and sovereignty rights.

(2)     Joseph C. Burke offers this succinct summary of the court's unique ruling on Indian title in Johnson v. M'Intosh :

The United States held the ultimate right to the soil; the tribes retained the right of possession with the limitation that they could sell only to the United States.  Marshall suggested that the right of the United States might be compared to a "seisin in fee" and the Indian right to a "lease for years." (138)

As Eric Kades has pointed out, the effect of the decision was to establish the federal government as a "monopsony," creating a single-buyer market ("History" par. 123) for the purpose of driving down the price of Indian land even further than it had been:  "By preserving a unitary entity to deal with the Indians, Marshall's opinions [in the trilogy cases] helped the United States to continue to buy Indian land cheaply" ("Dark Side").  Scholars have tended to view Marshall's ruling in M'Intosh as a foregone conclusion, a mere administrative codification of federal policy and national ambitions.  Robert A. Williams, Jr., for example, has characterized Marshall's decision in M'Intosh as a "fait accompli" (308), since Marshall's "judicial task was merely to fill in the details and rationalize the fictions by which Europeans legitimated the denial of the Indians' rights in their acquisition of the Indians' America" (312).

(3)    Whether or not the court's establishment of the federal government as the holder of "ultimate" title to Indian soil was legal or proper, M'Intosh is relied upon by Indians and Indian law scholars alike for the "half a loaf" it retained for Native Americans: recognition that certain vestiges of tribal sovereignty, particularly with respect to self-government, remained intact.  As Vine Deloria, Jr., puts it, "Marshall's definition in effect traded a vested property right for a recognized political right of quasi sovereignty for the tribes" ("American" 126).  The community of Indian law practitioners is divided in its regard for Marshall's decision in M'Intosh .  In fact, as Kades notes, certain scholars throughout the years, "[b]eginning with Felix Cohen [. . .], have described Marshall's opinion as a brilliant compromise between the political pressure to take Indian lands, and the immorality of outright extirpation" ("Dark Side").  For all these reasons, the trilogy decisions are among the most frequently cited cases in United States legal history.

Argument for Rhetorical Significance

 (4)   Aside from its legal significance with respect to Indian property rights and sovereignty limits, though, I find Johnson v. M'Intosh of critical historical value because it exposes hidden and unstable prejudices in United States American ideology, literally in their making.  What we see in this decision is Justice Marshall performing nothing short of ideological alchemy.  He "marshals" together all the ingredients of medieval conquest discourse theretofore used to justify removal of native peoples from their U.S. homelands and, recognizing that none, singly or in tandem, truly pass legal muster, applies to them the pressure of manifest destiny to transform them into a "new and different rule" of "conquest."  That "new and different rule" served to dispossess native peoples of their lands, decimate their numbers, and extinguish many native cultures as well, while skewing core dogma of U.S. democracy with faulty premises of superior entitlement.  Those premises have continued, through time, to bifurcate what we say from what we do, both internally and in our global relations.  Furthermore, inasmuch as the trilogy decisions established doctrines inconsistent with treaties, postures, and pronouncements that the legislative and executive branches of the government had represented up to that point in time, they set dangerous precedent for judiciary caprice, which we are seeing reach crisis proportions today.

 (5)    Accordingly, I invite the reader to approach the Johnson v. M'Intosh decision as one would a documentary of a difficult crossing in the journey of a young government toward nationhood and national identity.  What I argue is that M'Intosh and the trilogy document two parallel tracks of boundary expansion that were simultaneously occurring in the United States after the colonies achieved independence from Great Britain: at the same time that native territorial boundaries were being breached and pushed continually westward, the moral boundaries of nascent U.S. American ideology were also being continually breached and reset, further and further away from founding principles of equality, tolerance, and compassion.  The good news is that the slippage did not go down easily or uncontested.  The trilogy decisions, including the minority dissent filed in the second case, Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia , and the concurring opinion in the third, Worcester v. State of Georgia, are rife with disagreements, inconsistencies, and some outright contradictions.  To the extent that the justices' disagreements may reflect inherent, continuing, and growing unrest about the treatment of Native Americans in the United States and the ancillary damage done to the nation's founding principles, reparations and course changes still remain possible.  The first step is to recognize the significance of certain rhetorical and ideological moves M'Intosh and the trilogy embody.  The particular aspects of M'Intosh I propose to probe are Justice Marshall's treatment of medieval doctrines of "discovery" and "conquest," the nature of the "new rule" of conquest he forges from these traditional land-seizing justifications, and certain ideological dynamics between M'Intosh and the other two cases in the trilogy with respect to human rights and national interests.

Discovery Doctrine Endorsed on Principle

 (6)    Despite some pro forma equivocation on its plausibility and rationality, Justice Marshall agrees that the "doctrine of discovery" granted various European powers rightful entitlement to certain pieces of North America "discovered" under their commissions to be either empty or occupied by non-Christian, non-agricultural peoples, which Marshall finds had been historically considered to mean the same thing:  "[N]o distinction was taken between vacant lands and lands occupied by the Indians."  On his first pass, Marshall upholds discovery rights on principle:

On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire.  Its vast extent offered and [sic] field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy.

Further in the decision, he reiterates:

Although we do not mean to engage in the defence of those principles which Europeans have applied to Indian title, they may, we think, find some excuse, if not justification, in the character and habits of the people whose rights have been wrested from them.

And elsewhere:

This opinion conforms precisely to the principle which has been supposed to be recognized by all European governments, from the first settlement of America.  The absolute ultimate title has been considered as acquired by discovery [. . .].

Certainly, Marshall does more than simply review the history and practice here; he vigorously defends it, pointedly upholding the medieval premise that the primacy of Christianity and Western "civilization" justifies seizure of lands from non-Christian peoples.  Accordingly, he finds Great Britain's New-World claims, passed on to the newly independent United States, legal and binding in U.S. law.  The federal government's title, he ruled, was subject only to the fatally tenuous, as the later Cherokee case would prove, "Indian right of occupancy."

(7)    As Williams argues, Marshall's endorsement of the discovery doctrine on principle in M'Intosh facilitated not only the material dispossession but also the cultural extirpation of native peoples, on the basis of a doctrine which, at its heart, is inherently and inescapably biased and oppressive:

Perhaps most important, Johnson's acceptance of the Doctrine of Discovery into United States law preserved the legacy of 1,000 years of European racism and colonialism directed against non-Western peoples. [. . . ] While the tasks of conquest and colonization had not yet been fully actualized on the entire American continent, the originary legal rules and principles of federal Indian law set down by Marshall in Johnson v. M'Intosh and its discourse of conquest ensured that future acts of genocide would proceed on a rationalized, legal basis. (317)

Williams' placement of racism in discovery's wake supports my sense that race, class, and other manner of social oppression became embedded in U.S. ideology by the manner in which the Indian lands were taken.  Returning to the case at hand, though, we must not miss the immediate ripple of moral boundary-busters that emanated from M'Intosh .  The state of Georgia, for one, wasted no time in putting to use the "gift" that the M'Intosh decision clearly constituted to a state seeking seizure of title to Indian-occupied land.  Georgia began, in 1824, actions culminating in its 1828 Indian Removal Act (Washburn 27), the subject of the second case in the Marshall trilogy (1831), which resulted in the driving of some 16,000 Cherokees, in all, from their ancestral homelands in the south across the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma (Deloria, "American" 129).

(8)    Although M'Intosh does not give individual states the right to extinguish Indian title, reserving that unique power to the federal government, Georgia knew that obtaining federal approval was just a move away.  Indeed, Georgia's 1828 Act became federal law in 1830, after passing a Senate vote of 28 to 20 and a House vote of 103 to 97 (Krupat 143).  Justice Marshall's belated attempt to halt the Cherokees' removal by declaring Georgia's actions "repugnant to the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States" in the third case of the trilogy, Worcester v. State of Georgia , was for naught.  President Andrew Jackson effectively vetoed the court's order in that case for the release of two Vermont missionaries sentenced to four years of hard labor for remaining on the Cherokee lands claimed by Georgia without a permit and ordered that Georgia's removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma be executed as planned.

(9)    Thus, the Supreme Court's truncation of Indian title in M'Intosh , followed by its nullification of Indian legal rights in the second case by declaring the Cherokees neither citizens nor foreign nations and therefore unable to advance a complaint in the legal system, can be seen as having triggered the Georgia-Jackson coalition and the enactment of an epic American tragedy that even the Supreme Court could not stop.  Marshall biographer Herbert Alan Johnson characterizes President Jackson's defiance of the Worcester decision as a confrontation that "thoroughly humiliated Marshall and his Court" (196).  However, the role that M'Intosh played in constructing what Arnold Krupat calls "the story" that justified Indian removal in the 1830s cannot be overlooked.  In Krupat's view,

[. . .] Indian removal could finally be written into law and enforced in the 1830s because by that time, a certain story about America and about "civilization" had become sufficiently acceptable that it could be used as ideological justification for "certain sequences of causes and effects," for the policy of [ . . . ] "expansion with honor." (133)

In this sense, the justifications Marshall articulated for the federal government's title rights to Indian land in M'Intosh — as much as the case decision itself — worked like the evil magic described in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony , "set in motion" by a sorcerer's spell to send whites "swarming like larva / out of a crushed ant hill" (136) to dispossess natives across the United States.  Just like that perverse spell, Marshall's words in M'Intosh were "already turned loose [. . .] already coming [. . .] can't be called back" (138).

(10)    It is important to note that the "front" presented by the legislative and executive branches of the federal government prior to M'Intosh had by and large been one that sought to court the native chiefs in peace and friendship, a fact Marshall acknowledged in the denigrated Worcester decision, as will be discussed hereinafter.  Such good-government/bad-government strategies, coupled with the discursive skips and shifts evident among the trilogy cases themselves and in their relation to legislative and executive policies that followed in their wake, were consistent with the way Old World empire expansion had been conducted.  The Marshall decision in M'Intosh signaled that the business of empire would proceed in the New World in the same way but on a larger scale, with greater speed and legal backing.  Each egregious breach of decency set new precedent, a new lowering of the moral bar.  M'Intosh's endorsement of the discovery doctrine on principle dropped the bar low and long enough to release imperialist greed into the United States legal system.  

Discovery Doctrine Endorsed on Basis of Practice

(11)    If endorsement of the discovery doctrine on principle were not enough, though, Marshall also affirms the validity of its New-World application on the bases of historical precedent and the native people's acquiescence:

However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it; it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned. [. . .] However this restriction may be opposed to natural right, and to the usages of civil nations, yet, if it be indispensable to that system under which the country has been settled, and be adapted to the actual condition of the two people, it may, perhaps, be supported by reason, and certainly cannot be rejected by Courts of justice.

Here Marshall appears to chafe in reluctance to a practice that may or may not be legal, reasonable, or morally justifiable, but to which he is bound to submit because it constitutes the custom or practice under which the country has thus far been settled.  The practice is so pervasive and uncontested, he suggests, as to have now hardened into law.  In my opinion, this position is indefensible for several reasons.

(12)     First, the doctrine of discovery only applied to European powers, not the indigenous peoples over whose lands the monarchs were competing.  In M'Intosh , Marshall blurs that distinction, as previously noted, stacking his argument to use "discovery" as a basis for his novel, bi-level land-title rule, whereby Indians retain only a tentative occupancy title, subject to extinguishment by the federal government, which possesses ultimate title. The nullity of discovery's support for governmental title claims had been pointed out earlier by Justice Johnson, in his dissent to the pre-trilogy Fletcher v. Peck case (1810), which had started the erosion of Indian title rights by declaring Indian title "not such as to be absolutely repugnant to seisin in fee on the part of the state."  Justice Johnson had disagreed then with the majority's finding that both the Indians and the state of Georgia could claim title right to Indian soil:

[I]numerable treaties formed with [Indians] acknowledge them to be an independent people, and the uniform practice of acknowledging their right of soil, by purchasing from them, and restraining all persons from encroaching upon their territory, makes it unnecessary to insist upon their right of soil.[. . .] What, then, practically, is the interest of the states in the soil of the Indians within their boundaries?  Unaffected by particular treaties, it is nothing more than what was assumed at the first settlement of the country, to wit, a right of conquest or of purchase, exclusively of all competitors within certain defined limits. ( Fletcher v. Peck )

(13)    In his 1832 Worcester decision, finally, Marshall reins in his expansive interpretation of  "discovery" in this regard, placing it more in conformance with Justice Johnson's arguments twenty-one years earlier:

This principle, acknowledged by all Europeans, because it was the interest of all to acknowledge it, gave to the nation making the discovery, as its inevitable consequence, the sole right of acquiring the soil and of making settlements on it.  It was an exclusive principle which shut out the right of competition among those who had agreed to it; not one which could annul the previous rights of those who had not agreed to it.

Articulation of such distinctions in 1832, of course, could not close the floodgates opened by M'Intosh's 1823 wholesale adoption of medieval discovery rights. In fact, given the pattern of events that Marshall had seen flow from M'Intosh in those nine years, his pronouncements in support of Cherokee treaty and land rights in the 1832 Worcester case can be seen as gratuitous and self-serving, though Marshall biographer R. Kent Newmyer suggests he may have approached Worcester with an eye to "soften the impact of M'Intosh , and to harmonize the law of the land with his personal feelings about Native Americans" (qtd. in Kades, "History" par. 126).

(14)     Second, Marshall's position that the discovery rule had been settled by acquiescence and precedent in the United States is shamefully gratuitous for two reasons: 1) the treaties and verbal agreements the federal government had been forging with the Indians since first contact made no such representations of the government holding ultimate title to tribal lands, by virtue of the discovery doctrine or any other such dream-law; and 2) the Indians had no voice recognized by U.S. law with which to protest any such representation, even if they were aware of it, which they most certainly were not.  In this latter regard, Marshall's decision in the second case of the trilogy, Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia , proved the Indian's non-person legal status, ruling that because the Cherokees were neither U.S. citizens, nor a foreign nation, nor citizens of a foreign nation, they had no legal right under the Constitution to bring their complaint of eviction from ancestral homelands, in violation of a federal treaty, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

(15)     Kades employs Hirschleifer's principle of "muscular economics" to describe the manner in which the federal government coldly and efficiently expropriated tribal lands and, in this connection, cites Johnson v. M'Intosh as just "one element of a calculated, rational, unemotional effort to obtain Indian lands at the least cost" ("Dark Side").  Cost efficiency, Kades surmises, dictated Marshall's reasoning to an extent that necessarily excluded all moral and humane considerations:

This analysis rejects the kindness imputed to Marshall by the benevolent school and the truculence imputed by the malevolent school.  The working assumption is that such a sweeping national policy to transfer wealth must be understood, at bottom, in terms of selfishness (economics), not benevolence or malevolence (morality or lack thereof). ("Dark Side")

Certainly, the silence and invisibility of native peoples themselves from the trilogy cases prove that the U.S. government in its infancy stages had mastered from the British the fine art of "shunning" indigenous peoples into non-person status in order to justify seizure of their land. The pattern employed in the Crown's 17th century Ulster plantation project in Northern Ireland is replicated here in cool precision: suspension of legal rights, the outlawing of the culture, and the galvanizing of settlers against the indigenous "others."  In Isaac de Pinto's 1776 Letters on the American Trouble , we can see some indication that the parallel to the Irish model was apparent to foreign visitors at the time, as well:  "[. . .] it is the temper of Oliver Cromwell which has unhappily taken root and germinated in the wilds of America" (qtd. in Pagden 37).

(16)    The Ulster plantation parallels the U.S. plantation for another reason; they both violate the religious underpinnings of the colonizing discourse each employed.  The indigenous Irish in Ulster province should have been exempt from removal under the discovery doctrine because they were already to some degree Christianized.  Their removal on the basis of England's "discovery" and "conquest" rights makes as much sense as dispossessing the deeply spiritual Native Americans from their United States homelands to make room for a new government founded on freedom of religion.  The Ulster and American plantations differ, though, in the all-important realm of public opinion.  The oft-quoted observations of Alexis de Tocqueville summarize the nature and effect of the new level of "humanity" United States Americans had grafted onto Old World models of plantation:

The Spaniards by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained both these results with wondrous ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world.  It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity. (qtd. in Krupat 144)

Sir Francis Bacon enunciates the lethally subtle distinction that occurs when "plantation" is undertaken on occupied soil: "I like a Plantation in a pure soil; that is where People are not displanted to the end, to Plant others.  For else it is rather an Extirpation than a Plantation" (qtd. in Pagden 79).  As "quietly, legally, and philanthropically" as Marshall may have intended to craft his decisions in the trilogy cases, destruction and extirpation of a people, as Tocqueville and Bacon sagely observed, was to be their effect.

(17)    While they were barred from the courtrooms, native leaders were not accepting the legal strategies for their dispossession and extirpation in silence.  This excerpt from the testimony of an unidentified Indian leader during a hearing with land commissioners in 1793 speaks volumes on how the federal government's pronouncements of their diminished rights were received by native peoples:

Brothers:  We never made any agreement with the King nor with any other nation, that we would give to either the exclusive right of purchasing our lands; and we declare to you, that we consider ourselves free to make any bargain or cession of lands, whenever, and to whomever we please.  If the white people, as you say, made a treaty that none of them but the King should purchase of us, and that he has given that right to the United States, it is an affair which concerns you and him, and not us; we have never parted with such a power. (qtd. in Kades "Dark Side")

Again, the parallels to Old World models of conquest are compelling.  The Supreme Court's 19th century declarations of government entitlement to Indian land title, made in hearings conducted without the Indians present or even involved, are tantamount to the 16th century Spaniards' practice of reading off the Requerimiento, in Spanish, to inform New World natives who understood not a word of Spanish of their rights as a "conquered" people.

Why Focus on the Discovery Doctrine is Significant

(18)    Because the discovery doctrine does not, by principle or practice, constitute a defense for a governmental claim to ultimate title of Indian lands, the best explanation for Justice Marshall's endorsement of it is probably that which Deloria and Wilkins suggest.  It was not the idea of a cabal of mid-Atlantic businessmen buying Indian land that concerned the court but rather the possibility that European powers could still strengthen their New World holds through land-purchase alliances with Indians inside and surrounding the United States:

The Revolution resolved the question of political independence only for the Americans.  It did not affect the posture of other European nations toward Indian tribes.  After the war the British conducted several treaty councils with the tribes of the Ohio and Great Lakes country. [. . .] The Spanish quickly made treaties with the strong southeastern tribes, most notably the Creek and Choctaw, and in 1785 made an important treaty with the Comanche, which had to be conducted at several locations in the Southwest because the tribe controlled nearly one thousand miles of territory considered by the Spanish to be their borderlands.  Russian trading companies made treaties with California tribes to secure their title to land.  And following the Mexican Revolution in 1820, the new Mexican government immediately began making treaties with tribes who resided primarily in the area later settled by the United States, and continued to do so until the 1870s.  (9-10)

Sight should not be lost of the stature of those mid-Atlantic businessmen, however.  Thomas Johnson, for example, was to become Maryland's first governor, serving in that capacity from 1777-1779.  Later, he would himself serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.  Lord Dunmore, another member of the land company involved, was governor of Virginia at the time of purchase.  Clearly, Marshall's concentration on the discovery rule and his decision in M'Intosh that Indians could only transfer land title to the federal government are moves to "marshal" control of Indian land title into the hands of the federal government in order to keep European powers out and, as Kades says, to drive Indian land prices down.  Marshall's finding, in the second case of the trilogy, that the Cherokees did not constitute a foreign nation pinioned native peoples finally and securely under the thumb of the federal government.  However, as Deloria and Wilkins note in the excerpt quoted above, native leaders did continue to make treaties with outside concerns for some years after the trilogy cases were decided.

Doctrine of Conquest Endorsed

(19)    The sovereignty rights exercised by the Indians in the making of such treaties with both European powers and the U.S. federal government coupled with Tocqueville's previously mentioned observation about the relatively bloodless manner in which the Indians were being removed from their lands brings into focus the second principle of medieval crusade discourse adopted by Marshall in Johnson v. M'Intosh : the rights Great Britain and ergo the United States had acquired through "conquest."

 (20)   In M'Intosh , Justice Marshall relies heavily upon the principle that the federal government acquired the right to Indian soil through its "conquest" of native peoples:

Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim which has been successfully asserted.  The British government, which was then our government, and whose rights have passed to the United States, asserted a title to all the lands occupied by Indians, within the chartered limits of the British colonies.  It asserted also a limited sovereignty over them, and the exclusive right of extinguishing the title which occupancy gave to them.  These claims have been maintained and established as far west as the river Mississippi, by the sword. [. . .] It is not for the Courts of this country to question the validity of this title, or to sustain one which is incompatible with it.

In his recitation, shortly after this passage in M'Intosh , of the history of conquest of native peoples in the United States, Marshall refers to the "[f]requent and bloody wars, in which the whites were not always the aggressors"; the outcome he reports is that "European policy, numbers, and skill, prevailed."

(21)    As Tocqueville's observations suggest, though, the "sword" was not the prevalent strategy employed by either the Crown or the United States to dispossess native peoples of their land.  The fact is, as Kades notes, that wars were the exception to the rule:

The pattern of European land acquisition in New England, purchases punctuated by rare conquests, repeated itself across the rest of the continent.  The United States paid over $800 million for Indian lands.  According to Congress, the United States exercised the right of conquest only once [referring to a forced 1862 relocation of Indians in Minnesota, in which the Indians received the proceeds of the sale of their land] and then half-heartedly. ("History" par. 17) 

In his 1831 Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia decision, dismissing the Cherokee's protest of Georgia's Indian Removal Act, Marshall acknowledges that Indian lands had generally been acquired through voluntary cession:

Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government [. . .].

Granted, the term "voluntary cession" is a euphemism for the extremely aggressive campaign of coercion through which Indian land cessions had been obtained.  As Burke explains,

In theory, the Government treated with the tribes as sovereign nations, purchasing only the lands they chose to sell and guaranteeing forever their title to the land they chose to keep.  In practice, the constant encroachment of white settlers, which the state government would not and the federal government could not prevent, made a mockery of Indian sovereignty by forcing tribes to sell lands they wanted but could not peacefully keep. [. . .] Because the Indians, under pressure, usually sold the lands that the settlers demanded, the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court could maintain the formal position that cession had been voluntary. (150)

The slippage from the "conquest" defense is significant, however, in that it reveals Marshall's struggles, through the course of the trilogy cases, to construct a "spin" about past land title acquisitions capable of supporting future encroachments at an even more vigorous pace.

(22)    By the third decision, the 1832 about-face Worcester , Marshall seems to have relinquished M'Intosh's defense of war-based conquest rights completely, as he observes that "defensive war alone seems to have been contemplated" and "[t]he power of war is given only for defence, not for conquest."  The stress cracks from straddling legal and world-opinion forums were now beginning to show.

(23)    Perhaps the most compelling testimony, however, to the fact that land title had historically been transferred through purchases and treaties, not conquest, comes from the Cherokee Nation itself, in its December 18, 1829, written memorial to Congress, prior to the Cherokees' fruitless appeal to the Supreme Court:

In addition to that first of all rights, the right of inheritance and peaceable possession, we have the faith and pledge of the United States, repeated over and over again, in treaties made at various times. [. . .] If we were but tenants at will, why was it necessary that our consent must first be obtained, before these Governments could take lawful possession of our lands?  The answer is obvious.  These Governments perfectly understood our rights—our right to the country, and our right to self Government. [. . .] The undersigned memorialists humbly represent, that if their interpretation of the treaties has been different from that of the Government, then they have ever been deceived as to how the Government regarded them, and what she has asked and promised.  Moreover, they have uniformly misunderstood their own acts. (rpt. in Krupat 170-72)

Likewise, this passage from their November 5, 1829, memorial establishes that the Cherokees'  relationship with Great Britain prior to the colonies' independence had most certainly not been within the constraints of conquest:

It is evident from facts deducible from known history, that the Indians were found here by the white man, in the enjoyment of plenty and peace, and all the rights of soil and domain, inherited from their ancestors from time immemorial, well furnished with kings, chiefs, and warriors, the bulwarks of liberty, and the pride of their race.  Great Britain established with them relationships of friendship and alliance, and at no time did she treat them as subjects, and as tenants at will, to her power.  In war she fought them as a separate people, and they resisted her as a nation.  In peace, she spoke the language of friendship, and they replied in the voice of independence, and frequently assisted her as allies, at their choice to fight her enemies in their own way and discipline, subject to the control of their own chiefs, and unaccountable to European officers and military law.  Such was the connexion of this nation to Great Britain, to wit, that of friendship, and not allegiance, to the period of the declaration of Independence by the United States  [. . .]. (rpt. in Krupat 164-69)

Accordingly, the doctrine of conquest, to the victor go the spoils, did not quite match the history of Euro-Indian relations in the United States.  Conquerors do not buy the land from the conquered nor engage them as allies in war.  Marshall rose to the challenge of converting purchase into "conquest" by bumping out a "new and different rule" of conquest to justify the federal government's claims on Indian land title.  

Justification for the "New and Different" Rule of Conquest

(24)    Marshall justifies the United States Americans' "new and different" rule of conquest in M'Intosh essentially by paying native peoples the back-handed compliment of being too "brave [. . .] high spirited [and] fierce" to conquer by any legitimate means.  The way conquest is supposed to work, he says, is that,

The old and new members of the society mingle with each other; the distinction between them is gradually lost, and they make one people.  Where this incorporation is practicable, humanity demands, and a wise policy requires, that the rights of the conquered to property should remain unimpaired; that the new subjects should be governed as equitably as the old, and that confidence in their security should gradually banish the painful sense of being separated from their ancient connexions, and united by force to strangers. 

Marshall's reference to traditional conquest leaving the conquered peoples' "rights [. . .] to property [. . .] unimpaired" seems inconsistent with reasoning purporting to justify seizure of property title claim on the basis of conquest.  Nonetheless, note that the manner in which Marshall supports his "new rule" of conquest launches him back into the discovery-rule defense:

But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.  To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible, because they were as brave and high spirited as they were fierce, and were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence.

Again, Marshall is relying on the Western, medieval principle that non-Christian, non-agricultural peoples could legally and should morally be removed from their land and spiritually rehabilitated.  The Europeans, he finds, had no choice but to forge a new, albeit cowardly, way of conquest that the new United States government was bound to follow:

The law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered, was incapable of application to a people under such circumstances.  The resort to some new and different rule, better adapted to the actual state of things, was unavoidable.

Here is where the truly virulent damage of M'Intosh was injected into the United States legal system — and hence, our national ideology — for here, Marshall is codifying a "new rule" of justifiable deceit.

(25)    Unlike the valued and time-honored words that Justice Marshall enshrines in M'Intosh to support extinguishment of the Indians' human rights — words like "discovery," "conquest," and "civilization" — the words framed in those innumerable treaties negotiated with the native peoples assuring them security and sovereignty within their territories "forever," along with the allied friendship of the federal government, were cheap, disposable, and temporary.  For example, Justice Thompson's dissent to the Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia decision cites a provision of the Hopewell Treaty of 1785 that assured signatory tribes there was no truth to allegations made by "enemies of the United States [. . .] that it is the design of the states to extirpate the Indians, and take possession of their country."  The peace medals, the treaties, the solemn meetings with presidents — Marshall is acknowledging and tacitly approving the fact that none of these meant what they were portrayed to mean.

(26)    In Worcester , Marshall gives greater recognition to the strategy of subterfuge through which native peoples were now being determined by the highest court of the country to have been "conquered":

Fierce and warlike in their character, they [the Indians] might be formidable enemies, or effective friends.  Instead of rousing their resentments, by asserting claims to their lands, or to dominion over their persons, their alliance was sought by flattering professions, and purchased by rich presents. [. . .] Not well acquainted with the exact meaning of words, nor supposing it to be material whether they were called the subjects, or the children of their father in Europe; lavish in professions of duty and affection, in return for the rich presents they received; so long as their actual independence was untouched, and their right to self government acknowledged, they were willing to profess dependence on the powers which furnished them supplies of which they were in absolute need, and restrained dangerous intruders from entering their country: and this was probably the sense in which the term was understood by them.

At this point, Marshall's "history" of Euro-Indian relations conforms more precisely to what the Cherokees describe in their Memorials, but, of course, the damage is done.  

The Legacy and Significance of the "New and Different Rule"

(27)    The legacy of M'Intosh , on its own and in the context of the trilogy cases, is of the veritable "forked tongue."  The "new and different rule" Marshall approves is that saying one thing and doing another is a sanctioned expedient for furthering national interests.  With the new rule come ancillary principles of exclusion and oppression, and a model for a privileged, bi-level application of law.  Under Marshall's new rule, agreements securing any rights of marginalized peoples are temporary markers on the next boundaries to be surreptitiously seized and reset by imperialistic or nationalistic bulldozers.  Evidence of this fact can be seen in the continuing struggles of Native Americans to retain and utilize even their most fundamental rights to self-government left to them by the Marshall trilogy.  Continued judiciary erosion of those rights prompted hearings before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in February 2002.  Professor David Getches of the University of Colorado was among the legal scholars who testified to petition congressional intervention:

Indian rights and Indian sovereignty are essential in a government-to-government relationship that goes all the way back to the founding of the nation.  If the Court understood this and appreciated this grounding in original intent, Indian laws could be put back on track by the Court itself, but this seems unlikely.  The Court's primary mission has little to do with Indian law.  It will be up to Congress to reverse this trend. ("Hearing")

As Committee Vice-Chairman Ben Nighthorse Campbell said at the close of those hearings, in response to Getches' testimony, with a succinctness that can only come from aged exasperation,

[. . .] when I hear comments like yours [. . .] I do get mad [. . .] at [. . .] the way we have treated Indians in the history of this country.  It seems to me that they should have two sets of rights: that of being Native Americans as given in the treaties and that they inherit being an American, like any other American.  Yet, we see a constant erosion of their rights on both sides of that equation.

(28)    Thus it seems that the cultural bias of white, Christian supremacy embedded in U.S. ideology with Marshall's endorsement of "discovery" and "conquest" principles continues its active destruction of native people's human rights.  It must be noted that any implied characterization of the Indians' demise as inevitable due to some perception of inferiority on their part is belied by the events of record in the trilogy cases.  Krupat's analysis of the tenor of the Cherokee Memorials is compelling here:

The Cherokee memorialists will not allow their dispossession to be seen as savagist ideology would have it, as inevitable or necessary, neither God's will, nor Nature's law. Rather, should they be "translated" west of the Mississippi, such an outcome would be the result of no more than the force of American imperial power. (161)

Indeed, the political savvy and eloquence of the Cherokee leaders, apparent in those excerpts from their Memorials previously quoted, deeply affected Justice Joseph Story, who co-signed Justice Thompson's dissent to the majority opinion authored by Marshall in the Cherokee case.  Some measure of Story's regret regarding the government's treatment of the Cherokees can be seen in this excerpt from a January 13, 1832, letter to his wife:

At Philadelphia, I was introduced to two of the chiefs of the Cherokee Nation so sadly dealt with by the State of Georgia.  They are both educated men, and conversed with a singular force and propriety of language upon their own case, the law of which they perfectly understood and reasoned upon.  I never in my whole life was more affected by the consideration that they and all their race are destined to destruction.  And I feel, as an American, disgraced by our gross violation of the public faith towards them.  I fear, and greatly fear, that in the course of Providence there will be dealt to us a heavy retributive justice. (qtd. in Lubbers 65)

Examination of this passage shows Story falling prey to the all-too-human tendency to at first shift culpability (to the "State of Georgia"), only to be crushed, within the same breath, by the recoil of such suppression, since the "gross violation of the public faith towards them" rests, as he says, with all Americans.

(29)    Greed wrote the "new rule" of conquest Marshall endorsed in Johnson v. M'Intosh .  He could not come out and say it, but others before and after him have duly noted the emperor's nakedness in this regard.  As Pagden suggests, our national origins lie in our European ancestors' melding of Christianly avaricious desires:

[The American colonies] had been created out of a seemingly insatiable European need for precious metals, and an ambition, which the Ancients could scarcely have understood, to change the religious beliefs of their autochthonous inhabitants. (11)

Certainly, the blurring of "gold" and "God" in medieval discovery and conquest discourse was not overlooked by all people of the times, though.  In his In Defense of the Indians , for example, the 16th century Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas excoriates Spain's use of forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity, pursuant to the discovery rule, as a means to seize their lands:

All this drags innumerable souls to ruin and blocks the service of spreading the Christian religion by closing the eyes of those who, crazed by blind ambition, bend all their energies of mind and body to the one purpose of gaining wealth, power, honors, and dignities.  For the sake of these things they kill and destroy with inhuman cruelty people who are completely innocent, meek, harmless, temperate, and quite ready and willing to receive and embrace the word of God.  (26)

Long before the trilogy cases, greed had become sacralized in the foundations of United States American ideology.  In this respect, Williams is right; M'Intosh is a "fait accompli" formality.  Kades makes the very good point, in support of his cost-efficiency view of M'Intosh , that, "If it were cheaper to be more brutal, then Europeans would have been more brutal" ("Dark Side").  However, from the history of Euro-Indian relations Marshall uses to justify his "new and different rule," we can see that Marshall, at least, had concluded the native peoples could not have been defeated, at least when their numbers were strong, on brute force alone.

(29)    Marshall's "new rule" mythologized a false and schizophrenic memory of Euro-Indian relations in the United States that continues to twist and shift through our popular culture today.  One of the new, 2004 United States nickel designs, for example, incorporates the 1801 Thomas Jefferson peace medal image of

[. . .] two hands clasped in friendship — one with a military uniform cuff, symbolizing the American government, and the other with a silver band adorned with beads and a stylized American eagle, representing the Native American community with whom the United States sought good relations.  ("New Nickels")

That handshake, the international symbol of partnership and good will between respected equals, was interpreted by Marshall as a justifiably deceptive measure toward New World conquest and land seizure.  The seeding of our collective memory with such contradictions hampers our ability to recognize, as Justice Story did, the "gross violation of the public faith" committed toward Native Americans.  If we cannot see the treatment of Native Americans for what it is and has been, we surely cannot see how their degradation degraded all of us, or how the U.S. government's endorsement of deceit and treachery in furtherance of national interests "set in motion," along the lines that Silko's Ceremony suggests, an almost hypnotic suggestion of self-perpetuating avarice in our national ideology.

(30)     Pagden sees the United States' ambitions for global democracy as the third wave of the Imperium Romanum-turned-Imperium Christianum ideology (24) that fed our originary colonizing discourse:

The modern United States still pursues very much the same political ideology with respect to their relationship with the rest of the world.  If the European settlers exported to America one notion of a civitas, sustained and enforced by a corresponding vision of a Christian imperium, their descendents have created a universal order based upon another, but no less encompassing, conception of civility: democracy, an ideology which is quite as pervasive, and certainly as demanding as its ancient (and its Christian) ancestors.  (199)

The internal manifestations of our present-day "Imperium Democraticum," as it were, are no less "pervasive," "demanding," or exclusionary.  As Pagden says, the model for U.S. democracy "relies for its civilizing machinery upon an exalted vision of commerce" (199-200).  Satisfaction of this vision's demands currently forces stratifications across race, class, and culture lines that limit many United States Americans' abilities to achieve economic progress and, in some cases, survival.  Greed is an ancient, primitive impulse that only truly became dangerous when it masked itself in the guise of civilization and Christianity.  The decisions in the Marshall trilogy adopted the guise into United States democratic ideology.  Until we can see and begin to rectify the guise's first harm to the Native Americans, we cannot begin to arrest its continuing damage to our culture and restore our founding, democratic principles toward fulfillment of their original promise. 

Works Cited

Burke, Joseph C.  "The Cherokee Cases: A Study in Law, Politics, and Morality."  Native American Law and Colonialism, Before 1776-1903 .  Ed. John R. Wunder.  New York:  Garland, 1996. 136-67.

Casas, Bartolome de las.  In Defense of the Indians .  Ed. & Trans. Stafford Poole.  DeKalb:  Northern Illinois UP, 1974.

Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia.  30 U.S. 1.  U.S. Supr. Ct. 1831.  Lexis-Nexis. 23 Sep. 03.

Deloria, Vine, Jr.  "American Indians in Historical Perspective."  Native American Law and Colonialism, Before 1776-1903 .  Ed. John R. Wunder.  New York: Garland, 1996.  123-34.

Deloria, Vine, Jr., and David E. Wilkins.  Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations .  Austin: U of Texas P, 1999.

Fletcher v. Peck.  10 U.S. 87.  U.S. Supr. Ct. 1810.  Lexis-Nexis. 11 Sep. 03.

"Hearing Before the Committee on Indian Affairs.  United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, Second Session on Concerns of Recent Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Indian Tribal Governments in America."  27 Feb. 02.   U.S. Government Printing Office.  24 Oct. 03.  < https://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS20968 >.

Johnson, Herbert Alan.  "John Marshall."  The Justices of the United States Supreme Court:  Their Lives and Major Opinions .  Vol. 1.   Eds. Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel.  New York: Chelsea, 1997. 181-99.

Johnson v. M'Intosh.  21 U.S. 543.  U.S. Supr. Ct. 1823.  Lexis-Nexis. 21 Oct. 03.

Kades, Eric.  "The Dark Side of Efficiency: Johnson v. M'Intosh and the Expropriation of American Indian Lands.  U of Pa. Law Review 148 (Apr. 2000):1065-1190.  Lexis-Nexis. 23 Sep. 03.

---.  "History and Interpretation of the Great Case of Johnson v. M'Intosh ."  Law and History Review   19.1(Spring 2001): 67+.  11 Sep. 03. < https://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/19.1/kades.html >.

Krupat, Arnold.  Ethnocriticism:  Ethnography, History, and Literature .  Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Lubbers, Klaus.  Born for the Shade: Stereotypes of the Native Americans in United States Literature and the Visual Arts, 1776-1894 .  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

"New Nickels in 2004."  The United States Mint.  12 Nov. 03. < https://www.usmint.gov/mint_programs/index.cfm?action=nickel_series >.

Pagden, Anthony.  Lords of All the World:  Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500 – c. 1800 .  New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon.  Ceremony .  New York: Penguin, 1977.

Washburn, Wilcomb E.  "The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians."  Seventeenth Century America:  Essays in Colonial History .  Ed. James Morton Smith. New York: Norton, 1972.  15-32.

Williams, Robert A., Jr.  The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest .  New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Worcester v. State of Georgia.  31 U.S. 515.  U.S. Supr. Court. 1832.  Lexis-Nexis.  23 Sep. 03.

Documenting Legal Works in MLA Style

Gaining familiarity with the legal-citation practices used to document legal works may be impractical for student writers and sometimes even for scholars working in nonlegal fields. Nonspecialists can use MLA style to cite legal sources in one of two ways: strict adherence to the MLA format template or a hybrid method incorporating the standard legal citation into the works-cited-list entry. In either case, titles of legal works should be standardized in your prose and list of works cited according to the guidelines below.

Legal Style

Legal publications have traditionally followed the style set forth in the Harvard Law Review Association’s Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation , although some law reviews, such as the University of Chicago Law Review , have published their own style manuals. A more streamlined version of the Bluebook ’s legal-citation method, the ALWD Guide to Legal Citation , was introduced in 2000. The Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit associated with Cornell Law School, publishes an online guide to legal citation geared toward practitioners and nonspecialists instead of academics.

Those working in law are introduced to the conventions of legal citation during their professional training. Legal style is a highly complex shorthand code with specialized terminology that helps legal scholars and lawyers cite legal sources succinctly. It points specialists to the authoritative publication containing the legal opinion or law, regardless of the version the writer consulted.

Students and scholars working outside the legal profession and using MLA style should follow the MLA format template to cite laws, public documents, court cases, and other related material. Familiarize yourself with the guidelines in the MLA Handbook , sections 5.17–22, for corporate authors and government authors.

Following one of the fundamental principles of MLA style, writers citing legal works should document the version of the work they consult—not the canonical version of the law, as in legal style. As with any source in MLA style, how you document it will generally depend on the information provided by the version of the source you consulted.

Titles pose the greatest challenge to citing legal works in MLA style. Since MLA style keys references in the text to a list of works cited (unlike court filings, which cite works in the text of the brief, or academic legal writings, which cite works in footnotes ), writers should, with a few exceptions (noted below), standardize titles of legal sources in their prose and list of works cited. Following the MLA Handbook , italicize the names of court cases (70):

Marbury v. Madison

When you cite laws, acts, and political documents, capitalize their names like titles and set them in roman font (69):

Law of the Sea Treaty

Civil Rights Act

Code of Federal Regulations

When a legal source is contained within another work—for example, when the United States Code appears on a website that has a separate title—follow the MLA Handbook and treat the source as an independent publication (27). That is, style the title just as you would in prose—in italics if it is the name of a court case, in roman if it is a law or similar document; even though the legal source appears within a larger work, do not insert quotation marks around the title:

United States Code. Legal Information Institute , Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text.

For more on titles in legal citations in MLA style, see “Tips on Titles,” below.

Commonly Cited Sources

A few examples of using MLA style for commonly cited legal sources follow.

United States Supreme Court Decisions

United states supreme court dissenting opinions, federal statutes (united states code), public laws, federal appeals court decisions, federal bills, executive orders, state court of appeals, unpublished decisions, state senate bills, constitutions, international governing bodies.

Where you read the opinion of a United States Supreme Court decision will dictate how you cite it in MLA style. Legal-citation style, in contrast, points to the opinion published in the United States Reports , the authoritative legal source for the United States Supreme Court’s decisions, and cites the elements of that publication.

For example, the case Brown v. Board of Education is commonly abbreviated “347 U.S. 483” in legal citations: 347 is the volume number of United States Reports ; “U.S.” indicates that the opinion is found in United States Reports , which is the official reporter of the Supreme Court and indicates the opinion’s provenance; and the first page number of the decision is 483. (The American Bar Association has published a useful and concise overview of the components of a Supreme Court opinion .)

Regardless of the version you consult, you must understand a few basic things about the source: that it was written by a member of the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the majority and that, when you cite the opinion, the date on which the case was decided is the only date necessary to provide.

Following are examples of works-cited-list entries in MLA style for Brown v. Board of Education . The entries differ depending on whether the information was found on the Legal Information Institute website, published by Cornell University Law School, or on the Library of Congress website.

Legal Information Institute

The works-cited-list entry includes

• the government entity as author
• the name of the case (“Title of source” element)
• the year of the decision; it would also not be incorrect to include the day and month if it appears in your source
• the title of the website containing the case (“Title of container” element)
• the publisher of the website
• the website’s URL (“Location” element)

United States, Supreme Court. Brown v. Board of Education . 17 May 1954. Legal Information Institute , Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483.

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress site allows researchers to link to or download a PDF of the opinion from the United States Reports . To locate the case, the researcher must know the volume number of the United States Reports in which Brown v. Board of Education was published. A works-cited-list entry in MLA style would include the author (the government entity) and the title of the case, as well as the following information for container 1:

• United States Reports (“Title of container” element)
• vol. 347 (“Number” element)
• the date of the decision (“Publication date” element)
• page range (“Location” element)

Container 2 includes the name of the website publishing the case and its location, the URL. The publisher of the site is omitted since its name is the same as that of the site.

United States, Supreme Court. Brown v. Board of Education . United States Reports , vol. 347, 17 May 1954, pp. 483-97. Library of Congress , tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep347/usrep347483/usrep347483.pdf.

Sometimes, Supreme Court justices write dissenting opinions that accompany the published majority opinion. They are part of the legal record but not part of the holding—that is, the court’s ruling. If you cite only the dissent, you can treat it as the work you are citing:

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. Dissenting opinion. Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. United States Reports , vol. 550, 29 May 2007, pp. 643-61. Supreme Court of the United States , www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes/550bv.pdf.

In MLA style, it will generally be clearest to create an entry for the United States Code in its entirety and cite the title and section number in the text, especially if you are referring to more than one section of the code.

If an online search directs you to the web page for a specific section of the United States Code, it would not be incorrect to cite the page for that section alone. For example, if you want to use MLA style to document title 17, section 304, of the United States Code—commonly abbreviated 17 U.S.C. § 304 in legal citations—title 17 can be treated as the work and thus placed in the “Title of source” slot on the MLA template, or if you cite the United States Code in its entirety, title 17 can be placed in the “Number” slot.

Your entry will once again depend on the version you consult. Below are examples from various websites.

website for the United States Code

On the website for the United States Code, you would likely determine that the United States House of Representatives is the author of the code. The United States Code is the title of the source, and since the source constitutes the entire website, no container needs to be specified: the source is self-contained, like a book (see p. 34 of the MLA Handbook ). The site lists the Office of the Law Revision Counsel as publisher, so you would include that name in the “Publisher” slot, followed by the date on which the code was last updated, and the URL as the location:

United States, Congress, House. United States Code. Office of the Law Revision Counsel, 14 Jan. 2017, uscode.house.gov.

The body of your text or your in-text reference must mention title 17 and section 304 so the reader can locate the information you cite. It would not be wrong to include chapter 3 as well (title 17, ch. 3, sec. 304), although a discerning researcher will note that section numbers (304) incorporate chapter numbers (3), making “chapter 3” unnecessary to include.

If you do not include title 17 and section 304 in the text, you must include that information in the works-cited-list entry:

United States, Congress, House. United States Code. Title 17, section 304, Office of the Law Revision Counsel, 14 Jan. 2017, uscode.house.gov.

A nonspecialist would not be able to determine from the Legal Information Institute site that the United States House of Representatives is the author of the United States Code. A basic citation would include the title of the code as displayed on the site, the title of the website as the title of the container, the publisher of the website, and the location:

Government Publishing Office website

The website of the Government Publishing Office (variously referred to as the Government Printing Office) displays each statute heading (or “title”) as a web page:

You can treat title 17 as the work and the United States Code as the title of the container, as follows:

Title 17. United States Code, U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2011, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title17/html/USCODE-2011-title17.htm.

Or you can treat the United States Code as the title of the source and title 17 as a numbered section within the code, by placing title 17 in the “Number” slot on the MLA template:

United States Code. Title 17, U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2011, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title17/html/USCODE-2011-title17.htm.

Below are examples of how to cite other common legal sources in MLA style.

United States, Congress. Public Law 111-122. United States Statutes at Large , vol. 123, 2009, pp. 3480-82. U.S. Government Publishing Office , www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-123/pdf/STATUTE-123.pdf.

United States, Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Moss v. Colvin . Docket no. 15-2272, 9 Jan. 2017. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit , www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions.html. PDF download.

It is customary to title court cases by using the last name of the first party on each side of the v . You may also wish to shorten a long URL, as we have done here .

United States, Congress, House. Improving Broadband Access for Veterans Act of 2016. Congress.gov , www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/6394/text. 114th Congress, 2nd session, House Resolution 6394, passed 6 Dec. 2016.

United States, Congress, House, Committee on Education and Labor. The Future of Learning: How Technology Is Transforming Public Schools . U.S. Government Publishing Office, 16 June 2009, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111hhrg50208/html/CHRG-111hhrg50208.htm. Text transcription of hearing.

After a president signs an executive order, the Office of the Federal Register gives it a number. It is then printed in the Federal Register and compiled in the Code of Federal Regulations. Executive orders usually also appear as press releases on the White House website upon signing.

United States, Executive Office of the President [Barack Obama]. Executive order 13717: Establishing a Federal Earthquake Risk Management Standard. 2 Feb. 2016. Federal Register , vol. 81, no. 24, 5 Feb. 2016, pp. 6405-10, www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-02-05/pdf/2016-02475.pdf.

Minnesota State, Court of Appeals. Minnesota v. McArthur . 28 Sept. 1999, mn.gov/law-library-stat/archive//ctapun/9909/502.htm. Unpublished opinion.

Wisconsin State, Legislature. Senate Bill 5. Wisconsin State Legislature , 20 Jan. 2017, docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2017/related/proposals/sb5.

If a constitution is published in a named edition, treat it like the title of a book:

The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription . National Archives , U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 28 Feb. 2017, www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript.

The Constitution of the United States, with Case Summaries . Edited by Edward Conrad Smith, 9th ed., Barnes and Noble Books, 1972.

References to the United States Constitution in your prose should follow the usual styling of titles of laws:

the Constitution

But your in-text reference should key readers to the appropriate entry:

( Constitution of the United States, with Case Summaries )

If the title does not indicate the country of origin, specify it in the entry:

France. Le constitution. 4 Oct. 1958. Legifrance , www.legifrance.gouv.fr/Droit-francais/Constitution/Constitution-du-4-octobre-1958.

Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. United Nations, 1998, nfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpeng.pdf. Multilateral treaty.

United States, Senate. Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances. Congress.gov , www.congress.gov/114/cdoc/tdoc8/CDOC-114tdoc8.pdf. Treaty between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

Swiss Confederation. Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft. 18 Apr. 1999. Der Bundesrat , 1 Jan. 2016, www.admin.ch/opc/de/classified-compilation/19995395/index.html.

United Nations, General Assembly. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Resolution 217 A, 10 Dec. 1948. United Nations , www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. PDF download.

Writing for Specialists: A Hybrid Method

A writer using MLA style to document a legal work for a specialized readership that is likely to be familiar with the conventions of legal documentation may wish to adopt a hybrid method: in place of the author and title elements on the MLA format template, identify the work by using the Bluebook citation. Then, follow the MLA format template to list publication information for the version of the source you consulted.

For example, to cite the United States Code using the hybrid method, treat the section cited as the work. As above, you can omit the title of the website, United States Code , since the code constitutes the entire website and is thus a self-contained work.

17 U.S.C. § 304. Office of Law Revision Counsel, 14 Jan. 2017, uscode.house.gov.

If you are citing a court case, begin the entry with the title of the case before listing the Bluebook citation. In the hybrid style, cite Brown v. Board of Education as found on the Legal Information Institute website thus:

Brown v. Board of Education . 347 U.S. 483. Legal Information Institute , Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483.

Other sources (public laws, federal appeals court decisions, etc.) can be handled similarly.

If using the hybrid method, do not follow the handbook’s recommendation to alphabetize works that start with a number as if the number is spelled out. Instead, list works beginning with numbers before the first lettered entry and order numbered works numerically.

TIPS ON TITLES Styling titles when you document legal sources in MLA style may be challenging. Below are some guidelines. Standardize titles of legal sources in your prose unless you refer to the published version: as the MLA Handbook indicates, italicize the names of court cases, but capitalize the names of laws, acts, and political documents like titles and set them in roman font. When a legal source is contained within another work—for example, when the United States Code appears on a website with another title—follow the MLA Handbook , page 27, and treat the work as an independent publication. That is, style the title just as you would in prose—in italics if it is the name of a court case, in roman if it is a law or similar document; even though the legal source appears in a larger work, do not insert quotation marks around the title. In the names of court cases, use the abbreviation v. consistently, regardless of which abbreviation is used in the version of the work you are citing. To determine the name of a court case, use only the name of the first party that appears on either side of “v.” or “vs.” in your source; if the name is a personal name, use only the surname. To shorten the name of a court case in your prose after introducing it in full or in parenthetical references, use the name of the first-listed nongovernmental party. Thus, the case NLRB v. Yeshiva University becomes Yeshiva . If your list of works cited includes more than one case beginning with the same governmental party, list entries under the governmental party but alphabetize them by the first nongovernmental party: NLRB v. Brown University

NLRB v. Yeshiva University

Refer to the nongovernmental party in your prose and parenthetical reference, alerting readers to this system of ordering in a note .

Special thanks to Noah Kupferberg, of Brooklyn Law School, for assistance with these guidelines.

30 Comments

Laurie nebeker 08 august 2017 at 02:08 pm.

My eleventh-grade English students write research papers about Supreme Court cases. In the MLA 7th edition (5.7.14) there was a note about italicizing case titles in the text but not in the list of works cited or in parenthetical references. Has this changed for the 8th edition? Also, you've given examples about formatting SCOTUS rulings, but most of the resources my students use are articles about the cases from news sources, specialty encyclopedias, etc. Should case titles be italicized when they appear within article titles? Thanks!

Your e-mail address will not be published

Angela Gibson 09 August 2017 AT 07:08 AM

You are correct to note this change. To make legal works a bit easier to cite, we now recommend that writers italicize the names of court cases both in the text and the list of works cited. When the name of a court case is contained within another work, style the title just as you would anywhere else. Thus, a SCOTUS ruling in the title of a news article would appear in italics. Thanks for reading; I hope this helps!

Nia Alexander 31 January 2018 AT 06:01 PM

How would I cite the 2015 National Content Report? It contains information similar to that of a census.

Angela Gibson 01 February 2018 AT 07:02 AM

There is an example here: https://style.mla.org/citing-tables/.

Nathan Hoepner 12 February 2018 AT 01:02 AM

One of my students wants to use the Versailles Treaty (officially, "Treaty of Peace with Germany"). The Library of Congress has a pdf copy posted. Should he list the treaty in his sources with the URL, or, since is just a copy of the official treaty, just list title, date, and "multilateral treaty"?

ben zuk 17 March 2018 AT 06:03 PM

how would I cite Supreme Court case from Justia?

Patricia Morris 27 March 2018 AT 10:03 AM

Can you give an example for citing the Occupational Outlook Handbook, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics?

Michael Park 03 May 2018 AT 12:05 PM

How do i cite a introduced bill into congress

ML Chilson 04 November 2018 AT 05:11 PM

How do I cite a pending case that is still at the trial court level, including citation to the briefs that have been filed by the various parties?

Blah 08 November 2018 AT 11:11 AM

how do you cite a complaint in mla format

Marlow Chapman 10 December 2018 AT 08:12 PM

How would one cite a Title (specifically Title VII) from the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Angela Gibson 11 December 2018 AT 05:12 PM

How you cite it will depend on where you access it. Some points: following the MLA format template, your entry will start with the title of the law. This will either be Civil Rights Act or Title 7 (see the discussion of Federal Statutes above for considerations about which title to begin your entry with). Your in-text citation (whether in prose or parentheses) should direct the reader to the first element in your works-cited list (in other words, the title).

Jeff Jeskie 04 February 2019 AT 08:02 AM

How do my students properly list the Supreme Court cases that are linked on the Exploring Constitutional Law site by Doug LInder at UMKC Law School site?

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/home.html?

Patricia Moseley 14 February 2019 AT 10:02 AM

I need help. My 8th grade history class is answering questions on the US Constitution and citing their answer.

There are five rights in the First Amendment, which include freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for a redress of their grievances (U.S. Constitution).

Is this in-text citation done correctly? Also, are the amendments spell out or does one use the Roman numeral in text?

Thank You!!!

Angela Gibson 15 February 2019 AT 10:02 AM

If U.S. Constitution is the first element in the works-cited-list entry, the in-text citation is correct. Spell out ordinal numbers (First Amendment), but use numerals for numbers of count (Amendment V) and, by convention, use Roman numerals for divisions of legal works that use them.

Ella 05 December 2019 AT 08:12 PM

How would you cite a state supreme court case?

Ana 06 December 2019 AT 09:12 AM

How would I cite an Act? More precisely, I want to cite The New York State Dignity for All Students Act. How would I do it on in-text citations and on the work cited page? Thanks!

Amanda 17 April 2020 AT 05:04 PM

How would I cite a tribal constitution? Do I use the date of the original publication or the most recent amendment or resolution?

most are found on their tribal government websites so would i treat it like this:

(italicized) Title of Document: Subtitle if Given (italicized) . Edition if given and is not first edition, Name of Government Department, Agency or Committee, Publication Date, URL. Accessed Day Month Year site was visited.

yet, I still do not know what date to use. Or should i just cite it from a print publication or Nat. Archives so I can use the example given in your list above?

Angela Gibson 20 April 2020 AT 09:04 AM

Cite the version you're looking at and use the date of access if it's the only date you can provide.

Marissa 25 October 2020 AT 05:10 PM

How would you cite The Declaration of Independence?

Jennifer A. Rappaport 26 October 2020 AT 08:10 PM

Thanks for your question. Please consult Ask the MLA: https://style.mla.org/category/ask-the-mla/

Carol Holyoke 19 January 2021 AT 10:01 PM

Could you please tell me how to cite the Declaration of Independence? Do I put it in the Works Cited List?

Angela Gibson 20 January 2021 AT 09:01 AM

It is generally a good idea to create a works-cited-list entry for the version of the document you are transcribing a quotation from (e.g., see our example for the Constitution). Create your entry just as you would for any other source--follow the template of core elements and list any relevant elements that apply.

Diane 23 February 2021 AT 07:02 PM

How do I correctly cite a Congressional public law In Text? I can only find how to cite in works cited pages. Thank you!

Rowena 28 April 2021 AT 09:04 AM

If I quote sections from a piece of legislation does it need to be italicised as well as quotation marks?

Charlotte Norcross 15 November 2021 AT 11:11 AM

How do I correctly cite the congressional record from a specific session? Thanks!

Carl Sandler 02 February 2022 AT 02:02 PM

I am submitting a report to an attorney consisting of investigative findings related to an automobile accident. Some of the information in my report will be technical in nature and other information will be in the form of my opinion(s) based on conclusions drawn from deposition testimony of witnesses and persons knowledgeable of the event. Considering the report will be read by both legal professionals and others not of the legal profession, what approach and format (with examples, please) should be used to cite deposition testimony and also Exhibits presented during the taking of the deposition? I am familiar with Bluebook style of legal citations, however not all persons reading my report would have this same understanding.

Lev 18 April 2022 AT 11:04 AM

Dear MLA Editor: When citing court cases in another language (French), should I keep the title of the case in the original language, translate it, or provide a translation in brackets? The same question goes for the name of the docket number, court, date of publication, and other elements. The MLA manual does not offer any guidance on this! Thanks in advance for any help.

Heidi 27 April 2023 AT 10:04 AM

What is the proper way to reference a recently filed lawsuit (a pending case) in legal writing (letters and memos)? Thanks!

Jennifer Washington 13 February 2024 AT 11:02 PM

How are state educational codes shaping standards for textbooks and materials cited in-text and on works cited?

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The Supreme Court of the United States is the court of last resort in the United States. Many cases that the Court reviews concern the U.S. Constitution, and the Court's decisions have far-reaching implications for the citizenry and the history of the United States. This guide is designed to give some background information and suggest resources for further research on the history of the Court , the Justices of the Court , and the Court's practice and decisions .

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Guest Essay

‘This Could Well Be Game Over’

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

While the Supreme Court ruling on Monday that states cannot bar Donald Trump from appearing on their presidential ballots garnered a lot of attention, the more politically consequential decision came on Feb. 28, when the court set a hearing on Trump’s claim of presidential immunity for the week of April 22.

That delay is both a devastating blow to President Biden’s campaign and a major assist to Trump’s multipronged effort to minimize attention to the details of the 91 felony charges against him.

It increases the likelihood that neither of the two federal indictments of Trump will come to trial before the November election. A failure to hold at least one of these trials before Nov. 5 would undermine a key Democratic goal: to expand voters’ awareness of the dangers posed by a second Trump term.

Those trials, should they occur, are very likely to produce a flood of daily headlines and television broadcasts describing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and his sequestering of classified government documents in his Mar-a-Lago home — a media onslaught reminiscent of the Senate Watergate hearings , which stretched out over 51 days in 1973.

“Early on, I called the federal election subversion case potentially the most important case in this nation’s history ,” Richard L. Hasen , a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote on his Election Law Blog . “And now it may not happen because of timing, timing that is completely in the Supreme Court’s control. This could well be game over.”

Whether the trials are held before the election is crucial to the outcome, for at least two reasons.

First, a surprisingly large segment of the electorate has either no idea or slight knowledge of the charges against Trump. Increased knowledge of these charges can only work to Biden’s advantage.

Second, a key element of the Biden campaign’s strategy is to mobilize what political strategists are calling the anti-MAGA majority . Many anti-MAGA voters cannot be relied on to turn out unless the threat of a Trump-MAGA victory is put squarely before them — something the trials would help accomplish.

A Jan. 30 to Feb. 1 YouGov survey asked voters whether they knew a) that Trump has “been charged with falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to a porn star,” b) that he “has been charged with taking highly classified documents from the White House and with obstructing efforts to retrieve them,” c) that he “has been charged with conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election” and d) that he “has been charged with attempting to obstruct the certification of a presidential election.”

Of those surveyed, 20 to 25 percent said they did not know, and 20 to 25 percent said they were “not sure” what the charges against Trump were; in other words, nearly half of those surveyed had little or no comprehension of the array of allegations against him.

A Jan. 25 to 29 YouGov survey asked a different question: “How much have you heard about” each of the indictments? In this case, independent voters, who will play a large role in determining the outcome of the 2024 election, were far less familiar with the charges than Democrats and Republicans.

More than half of Republicans (55.5 percent) and Democrats (50.7 percent) told YouGov they had heard “a lot” about the indictments, compared with 41.7 percent of independents.

These poll findings pose interesting challenges for political analysts. While political professionals differ in the details of the strategies they believe Biden should adopt, the Supreme Court decision to postpone adjudication of Trump’s immunity claims is a genuine setback.

Nate Silver , the founder of 538 , argued that Biden needs to adopt a persuasion strategy to persuade voters who supported Biden in 2020 but now support Trump to return to the Democratic fold.

“Democrats usually assume that they win elections” through “turnout rather than persuasion,” Silver wrote in a recent Substack post . “It’s not a crazy proposition, by any means. But it looks like a losing approach for 2024.”

As recently as 2012, according to Silver, putting resources into increasing turnout proved effective in large part because the overall electorate was decisively more Democratic than Republican, 38 to 32.

Since then, Silver wrote, “Democrats have lost their edge on party ID in many polls. In Gallup polling throughout 2023, for instance — in contrast to the Democratic edge in 2012 — the same percentage of Americans (27 percent) identified as Democratic and Republican, with 43 percent identifying as independent.” Recent Gallup polling found that when asked whether they lean to either party, independents now split evenly between voting Democratic and Republican.

Silver analyzed details of a recent Times/Siena poll to show “the potential dangers for Democrats of the base-turnout focus”:

The poll asked voters who they voted for in 2020 as well as who they plan to vote for in November. This produced a big gap; Biden actually led by 12 points in the recalled 2020 vote, but he trails Trump by 5 points in 2024 voter preferences: 2020 recalled vote (excluding nonvoters): Biden 53 percent, Trump 41 percent. 2024 vote (including leaners): Trump 48 percent, Biden 43 percent.

This is, Silver continued, “a bad data point for the White House. In the poll, only 83 percent of voters who say they chose Biden in 2020 plan to vote for him this year, whereas 97 percent who voted for Trump plan to vote for Trump again.”

More important, these Biden defectors are not part of the Democratic base, Silver argued:

If Biden is retaining only 83 percent of his 2020 vote overall, that implies he’s doing quite poorly with people who voted for him in 2020 but who are not loyal Democratic primary voters. Only about 75 percent of this group say they’ll vote for Biden again.

Silver’s conclusion?

If they want to maximize their chances of winning in November, Democrats ought to focus on this group of vote-switching swing voters first, and the base second.

Adam Carlson — a former Democratic pollster who still aggregates data on voting trends among key subgroups from several surveys — has gathered material supportive of Silver’s argument that Democrats need to restore loyalty among past Democratic voters now considering voting for Trump.

In a Feb. 28 posting on X, Carlson wrote: “The seven subgroups that are paying the least attention to the 2024 election are the same seven subgroups that are swinging the most toward Trump in the polls.”

Specifically, after combining data from polls conducted Feb. 1 to Feb. 27, Carlson found that 17 percent of independents were paying attention to the election and that this group had shifted 26.3 points toward Trump compared with their actual vote in 2020.

Similarly, 27 percent of Hispanics said they were following the election, while their vote intentions had moved 16 points toward Trump since 2020. Carlson described similar trends for low-income, young, Black and moderate voters.

Michael Podhorzer , a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a founder of the Analyst Institute , makes two basic assumptions in calculating effective Democratic strategies this year.

The most important premise underpinning Podhorzer’s analysis is that anti-MAGA voters make up a majority of the electorate. The second assumption is that this anti-MAGA majority is made up of two parts, the first being reliable voters who consistently turn out on Election Day and the second consisting of low-turnout, unreliable voters who need to be repeatedly warned in detail of the dangers posed by the election of Trump and his allies.

“The ‘anti-MAGA majority’ is the most important dynamic in our elections today,” Podhorzer wrote in a Feb. 28 posting on his Substack newsletter, “ Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport ”:

When the question is called, most Americans don’t want a MAGA future. Of the 178 million Americans who have voted at least once beginning in 2016, about 94 million have voted against MAGA, and about 84 million have voted for MAGA.

The “dangerous mistake” Democrats are quite likely to make going into the November election, Podhorzer argued,

is to take for granted that the ordinary voters who will decide this election will invariably make their decisions based on whether they judge Biden or Trump better able to perform the presidency, rather than on what they and their families have to lose if Trump and MAGA win. The evidence of voter behavior since 2016 tells us that people will do the latter, as long as these stakes are made clear to them. But if we treat this like a normal election — just another round of single combat between two individuals, Joe Biden and Donald Trump — Trump and MAGA could win.

A crucial bloc of voters, according to this view, is composed of “newly engaged voters — those who only entered (or rejoined) the electorate in 2018 or later — and who have been driving historically high turnout, and have been breaking dramatically, and consistently, for Biden and Democrats when the stakes have been a MAGA future.”

In support of his analysis, Podhorzer pointed to the 2022 midterm elections. Those contests are “best understood as two different elections — one in the key battlegrounds, where voters understood the stakes and turned out in droves to reject MAGA; the other where voters did not understand the stakes and turned out at low levels more typical of a midterm, allowing the predicted Red Wave to occur.”

Podhorzer provided data to back up his claim: In 2022, turnout nationwide fell by four points, to 46 percent, compared with 50 percent in 2018 — which was widely perceived as a referendum on Trump. Democrats suffered a net loss of nine House seats in 2022.

In the states where Republicans ran MAGA candidates in competitive races for statewide office — Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan — turnout from 2018 to 2022 remained constant at 53 percent, and Democrats gained four House seats.

The bottom line: “When people don’t recognize those stakes, they stay home,” which then “leads us to the unacknowledged problem with the anti-MAGA majority dynamic for Democrats,” Podhorzer wrote. “Their majorities in the Electoral College battleground states depend on sustaining ahistorically high turnout and support from people who were not regular voters in 2016.”

Not only are these voters “alienated from partisan politics”; they also “lack confidence in Democrats’ governing ability.”

At the same time, Podhorzer added, “not only are most voters now not paying attention to Trump’s legal troubles, they know next to nothing about what he’s said on the campaign trail about what he will do if elected again, let alone the very specific and chilling agenda his allies have assembled in the event he wins a second term.”

Because so many of the anti-MAGA voters are not enthusiastic about Biden, Podhorzer wrote, Democrats need to make the case that “in November, we are not choosing a leader; we are choosing the nation we will become.”

The federal trials that now appear as though they may be deferred until after the election — possibly permanently deferred — may well have persuaded hesitant voters that American constitutional government was on the ballot.

Celinda Lake , a Democratic pollster, argued in an email that in the drive to mobilize low-turnout voters, it is not so important whether Trump goes on trial but whether he is convicted: “It’s not trials but convictions that matter. If Trump is convicted of a criminal felony by a jury, of plotting to overturn or steal the election, that will matter.” Lake added: “A Trump conviction would increase voting among low-turnout Democratic men, and it would come second to abortion in mobilizing low-turnout Democratic women.”

In a Dec. 26 Times guest essay, “A Trump Conviction Could Cost Him Enough Voters to Tip the Election,” Lake; Norman Eisen , the special counsel for the 2019-20 impeachment of Trump; and Anat Shenker-Osorio , a political consultant, wrote:

Why do the polls register a sharp decline for Mr. Trump if he is convicted? Our analysis — including focus groups we have conducted and viewed — shows that Americans care about our freedoms, especially the freedom to cast our votes, have them counted and ensure that the will of the voters prevails. They are leery of entrusting the Oval Office to someone who abused his power by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to deny or take away those freedoms.

Why is a conviction so much more important than an indictment?

Lake, Eisen and Shenker-Osorio wrote:

Voters understand that crime must be proved. They recognize that in our legal system there is a difference between allegations and proof, and between an individual who is merely accused and one who is found guilty by a jury of his peers.

Whit Ayres , a Republican pollster, described in an email the cross-pressures on voters, particularly Republican voters in the event of a trial and, possibly, a conviction:

The exit polls for G.O.P. primary voters asked if voters would consider Trump unfit for office if he is convicted of a crime, and the numbers were significant: 31 percent in Iowa, 47 percent in New Hampshire and 36 percent in South Carolina. But that tells you nothing about how these people would vote in a Trump-Biden race, because they also likely consider Biden unfit because he’s too old to run again.

Another key factor, Ayres wrote, is “which trial we are considering. If I were designing a case that would be easy for Republicans to dismiss as a partisan witch hunt, it would be the Alvin Bragg-Stormy Daniels hush-money case in New York.”

Conversely, Ayres continued, “the Jack Smith indictments — classified documents and the Jan. 6 insurrection — are far more serious and could conceivably change some voters’ minds if they come to trial before Election Day. But recent events and the current calendar make that highly unlikely.”

Overall, Ayres was dismissive of the potential of the trials to determine the outcome of the election: “If Democrats want to defeat Trump, they need to get Biden to step aside and nominate someone who would be truly competitive with Trump, which Biden is not right now. Putting their hope in trials that haven’t happened yet is a pipe dream.”

Ayres’s last point about Biden’s age raises the question: Can the Biden campaign somehow lessen or mute concerns about his ability to perform the tasks essential to the presidency? Can it shift public attention to the broad range of Trump liabilities and to the threats, coming from Trump himself and many others, that a second Trump administration would pose to American democracy, its Constitution and the rule of law?

These doubts as to Biden’s competence have remained a dominant public concern — despite a significantly improving economy with average annual G.D.P. growth for the first three years of the Biden administration at 3.4 percent, outpacing the 2.6 percent during the first three years of the Trump years, declining rates of inflation and an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent.

The Biden campaign will not be lacking in one crucial resource: campaign cash. Biden’s campaign committee has raised $107.6 million as of early February, according to Open Secrets , compared with $85.3 million by Trump’s committee. The pro-Biden super PAC, Future Forward, has, in turn, announced plans to spend $250 million in the current election cycle, much of it in the weeks before Nov. 5.

No matter the size of Biden’s cash advantage, campaign spending will be most effective if the campaign has concrete material to work with — something a timely Trump trial would provide.

In 2000 the Supreme Court, with a Republican-appointed majority, decided a presidential election in the Republican candidate’s favor. There is something very wrong with our democracy if this happens twice in less than a quarter-century.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , X and Threads .

Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @ edsall

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When the Supreme Court Rules on Colorado’s Ballot, Pay Attention to What It Doesn’t Say

A guide to understanding what the ruling could mean, and what the media will simplify it into meaning..

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court opted to hear the Jan. 6 immunity challenge from the District of Columbia this spring, a matter they could and should have summarily affirmed weeks earlier. The effect will be to roll the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection trial, which ought to have started this week, into early fall. Last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a separate case, seeking to remove the former president from the Colorado ballot as a result of his conduct on Jan. 6, 2021. We are currently awaiting a decision in that case—one that could come as soon as tomorrow—but it will affect the ballots in Maine and Illinois as well as other states.

In neither election-related case, however, is the Supreme Court likely to rule on the central issue: the question of Donald Trump’s culpability for his participation in an insurrection against the United States. In the immunity case, the issue before the court is a broader question about presidential untouchability and separation of powers. And oral argument in the ballot access case strongly suggests that the court’s ruling will ultimately focus on one or more legal technicalities about who decides ballot access questions and how. (Oddly enough, the only real discussion of the underlying issue of the insurrection at arguments was initiated by Trump’s own lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell, who described the events as “ a riot … shameful, criminal, violent.”) But the fact that the court may be silent on the insurrection itself does not mean it won’t send a signal about Trump’s conduct in connection with the events of that day. The real question is whether our media will be savvy enough to hear it.

Courts and other legal actors have a way of saying one thing with their legal conclusion and another with the way they reach it. James Comey, for example, absolved Hillary Clinton of legal violations with respect to her email server, while sending a very different signal about his views of her conduct more broadly. More recently, special counsel Robert Hur absolved President Joe Biden of legal liability in the classified documents matter he was tasked with investigating but used his report to let it be known his personal and even medical-via-a-lawyer-not-a-doctor views of the mental acuity of the president.

The Supreme Court itself has a famous history of ruling for one party on the legal bottom line even in cases that deliver a broader loss to the legal winner. Take one of the most famous Supreme Court cases of all time, Marbury v. Madison , in which the court technically ruled for the incoming Jefferson administration in thwarting the outgoing Adams administration’s attempt to pack the courts, while in fact dealing the Jeffersonians a more consequential loss by seizing to the court itself the power to overrule laws.

When the Supreme Court issues its opinion in the ballot access case, therefore, smart court watchers will be looking for not only the legal bottom line on whether Trump can stay on the ballot, but also what signal the court sends the public about Trump’s underlying conduct. Because pending before it is a case in which the Colorado courts expressly found that Trump did engage in an insurrection. In fact, every entity that has ruled on the merits of that question—from the Colorado courts, to the Maine secretary of state, to now the Illinois judiciary, to the findings of the Jan. 6 committee and the House impeachment inquiry—have so agreed. Will the court reject all those conclusions? Will the court take this opportunity to absolve Trump of insurrection? If the court declines to do that, it will speak more loudly than whatever it formally holds on the technical legal arcana it seems likely to focus on in its opinion.

That doesn’t mean everyone will hear it. If history is any guide, one likely reaction from the press will be a host of “Trump exculpated!” stories, in much the same way the Mueller report was treated as a blanket exoneration. It’s a forgivable error. Technical legal arcana is technical and arcane, and “Trump exculpated!” is journalistic dopamine. But that doesn’t mean that reporters should knock over the proverbial phone booths in rushing, en masse, to announce that Trump has “won” or “lost” the case once the opinion is released. Journalism focused on the horse race and not the stakes will be unlikely to capture the fact that the court may not dispute Trump’s participation in an insurrection when presented with the chance to do so, although that latter is the headline as well as a fact more relevant to the things voters will need to weigh come November. To our minds, “Court Rules Trump Can Remain on Ballot, Declines to Absolve Him of Insurrection” feels like a more accurate framing of the actual stakes of the Colorado case, assuming that the case goes how we anticipate.

One might wonder why it is that when it’s Donald Trump openly committing crimes and evading responsibility, the default media narrative is that he didn’t commit crimes, yet when Democrats are found to have committed no crimes, the story becomes that they are still sufficiently crime-adjacent to be maximally crimey. The coverage of the Comey and Hur reports focused orders of magnitude more on their non-conclusion details than the decision not to press charges. Whereas our press largely fell for Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s efforts to spin the Mueller report into an “exoneration” at the expense of the damning facts about obstruction of justice that were laid out in its pages.

Maybe it’s just that everyone, reporters included, already knows that Trump commits crimes. We all saw Trump’s followers carry his banner into the Capitol, overrunning police barricades, smashing windows, and bludgeoning law enforcement, in acts many of them have said, in court, during their own prosecutions, they did at Trump’s direction. And perhaps reporters are less sure about all that legal jargon and technical conclusions than they are of the non-legal assertions made by Comey and Hur. “But Her Emails” or “Biden So Old!” thus become more newsy than legal conclusions—because shiny objects are gonna shiny. But that’s not an evenhanded approach, and it’s certainly not the approach a self-governing citizenry needs from its Fourth Estate, with democracy itself on the line.

Maybe this is all unfair. Maybe we can expect better. Maybe if the Supreme Court issues an opinion ruling for Trump on technicalities while still remaining silent on the lower court’s finding that he engaged in insurrection, we’ll see headlines and reporting capturing the dual nature of such a ruling and the momentous implications of a court that seems to accept that he did what we know he did. But we’re not holding our breath.

We all know Jan. 6 happened because we witnessed it, we impeached him for it, a select committee exhaustively reported on it, in sessions that were televised. Hundreds of participants have been sentenced for participating in it. The only material question for the high court is whether he will be allowed to get away with it. What the media should be reporting when these cases come down would not so much be about picking the “winner” or “loser” in a highly technical appeal around ballot access. Instead, it would be repurposing the old punchline: We know exactly what Donald Trump is. Now we’re just haggling about the price.

The Supreme Court Killed the College-Admissions Essay

The end of affirmative action will pressure high schoolers to write about their race through formulaic and belittling narrative tropes.

Nestled within yesterday’s Supreme Court decision declaring that race-conscious admissions programs, like those at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, are unconstitutional is a crucial carveout: Colleges are free to consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.” In other words, they can weigh a candidate’s race when it is mentioned in an admissions essay. Observers had already speculated about personal essays becoming invaluable tools for candidates who want to express their racial background without checking a box—now it is clear that the end of affirmative action will transform not only how colleges select students, but also how teenagers advertise themselves to colleges.

For essays and statements to provide a workaround for pursuing diversity, applicants must first cast themselves as diverse. The American Council on Education, a nonprofit focused on the impacts of public policy on higher education, recently convened a panel dedicated to planning for the demise of affirmative action; admissions directors and consultants emphasized the need “to educate students about how to write about who they are in a very different way,” expressing their “full authentic story” and “trials and tribulations.” In other words, if colleges can’t use race as a criterion in its own right, because the Court has ruled doing so violates the Fourteenth Amendment, then high schoolers trying to navigate the nebulous admissions process may feel pressure to write as plainly as possible about how their race and experiences of racism make them better applicants.

Turning personal writing into a way to market one’s race means folding oneself into nonspecific formulas, reducing a lifetime to easily understood types. This flattening of the college essay in response to the long hospice of race-based affirmative action comes alongside another reductive phenomenon upending student writing: the ascendance of generative AI. High schoolers , undergraduates , and professional authors are enlisting ChatGPT or similar programs to write for them; educators fear that admissions essays will prove no exception . The pitfalls of using AI to write a college application, however, are already upon us, as the pressure to sell one’s race and race-based adversity to colleges will compel students to write like chatbots. Tired platitudes about race angled to persuade admissions officers will crowd out more individual, creative approaches, the result no better than a machine’s banal aggregation of the web. Writing about one’s race can be clarifying, even revelatory; de facto requiring someone write about their racial identity, in a form that can veer toward framing race as a negative attribute in need of overcoming, is stifling and demeaning. Or, as the attorney and author Elie Mystal tweeted more bluntly yesterday, “Why should a Black student have to WASTE SPACE explaining ‘how racism works’”?

Read: Elite multiculturalism is over

Such essays can feel prewritten. Many Black and minority applicants “believe that a story of struggle is necessary to show that they are ‘diverse,’” the sociologist and former college-admissions officer Aya M. Waller-Bey wrote in this magazine earlier this month; admissions officers and college-prep programs can valorize such trauma narratives, too. Indeed, research analyzing tens of thousands of college applications shows that essay content and style predict income better than SAT scores do: Lower-income students were much more likely to write about topics including abuse, economic insecurity, and immigration. Similarly, another study found that girls applying to engineering programs were more likely to foreground their gender as “women in science,” perhaps to distinguish themselves from their male counterparts. These predictable scripts, which many students believe to be most palatable, are the kind of stale , straightforward narratives—about race, identity, and otherwise—that AI programs excel at writing. Language models work by analyzing massive amounts of text for patterns and then spitting out statistically probable outputs, which means they are adept at churning out clichéd language and narrative tropes but quite terrible at writing anything original, poetic , or inspiring .

To explore and narrativize one’s identity is of course important, even essential; I wrote about my mixed heritage for my own college essay. Race acts as what the cultural theorist Stuart Hall called a “ floating signifier ,” a label that refers to constantly shifting relationships, interactions, and material conditions. “Race works like a language,” Hall said, meaning that race provides a way to ground discussions of varying experiences, support networks, histories of discrimination, and more. To discuss and write about one’s race or heritage, then, is a way of finding and making meaning.

But molding race into what an admissions officer might want is the opposite of discovery; it means one is writing toward somebody else’s perceived desires. It’s not too dissimilar from writing an admissions essay with a language model that has imbibed and reproduced tropes that already exist, blighting meaningful self-discovery on the part of impressionable young people and instead trapping them in unoriginal, barren, and even debasing scripts that humans and machines alike have prewritten about their identities. Chatbots’ statistical regurgitations cannot reinvent language, only cannibalize it; the programs do not reflect so much as repeat. When I asked ChatGPT to write me a college essay, it gave me boilerplate filler: My journey as a half-Chinese, half-Italian individual has been one of self-discovery, resilience, and growth . That sentence is broadly true, perhaps a plus for an admissions officer, but vapid and nonspecific—useless to me, personally. It doesn’t push toward anything meaningful, or really anything at all.

Read: The college essay is dead

A future of college essays that package race in canned archetypes reeking of a chatbot’s metallic touch could read alarmingly similar to the very Supreme Court opinions that ended race-conscious admissions yesterday: a framing of race “unmoored from critical real-life circumstances,” as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent; a pathetic understanding of various Asian diasporic groups from Justice Clarence Thomas; a twisting of landmark civil-rights legislation, constitutional amendments, and court cases into a predetermined and weaponized crusade against any attempt to promote diversity or ameliorate historical discrimination. Chatbots, too, make things up , advance porous arguments, and gaslight their users. If race works like a language, then colleges, teachers, parents, and high-school students alike must make sure that that language remains a human one.