Word: alito
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Douglas Kmiec is the kind of Catholic voter the G.O.P. usually doesn't have to think twice about. The Pepperdine law professor and former Reagan Justice Department lawyer (Samuel Alito was an office mate) attends Mass each morning. He has actively opposed abortion for most of his adult life, working with crisis pregnancy centers to persuade women not to undergo the procedure. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and occasionally sends a contribution to Focus on the Family...
...many cases were not decided by 5-4 votes," says Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law. "With its new blood the court is still developing new patterns of communication and cooperation." (Until Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito came along, the court had the longest-serving body of the same nine people in Supreme Court history.) Nevertheless, even with fewer nail-biting decisions handed down this term, Justice Kennedy has continued to play a dominant role - swing voter or not - preventing Roberts and fellow conservatives from dominating the court...
...dissents that often resulted in Kennedy determining the law. In the 24 decisions that came down 5-to-4 last year, Kennedy was the decisive vote in every case, never once dissenting. Of those 24, 19 of them reflected the traditional conservative-liberal split (Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Alito versus John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer) with the conservatives winning 13 and the liberals getting six. Says Lazarus, "The only really big case the liberals won 5-4 last term was the global warming case, Massachusetts v. EPA." This term, by contrast, was much...
...Kentucky's employment case ruling last week, which found the state's public pension plan not to be age discriminatory, Justice Breyer wrote the opinion joined by fellow liberals Stevens and Souter and by conservatives Roberts and Thomas. (Ginsberg joined Scalia and Alito in Kennedy's dissent.) Likewise the Exxon case, where the court cut the company's punitive damages in the Valdez oil spill, had a similar melange in its 6-3 ruling. "In one way there wasn't the unanimity and consensus the chief justice said he wants, but there was something reassuring this term," says Lazarus...
...Wednesday, after the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional in cases of child rape, Obama surprised some observers by siding with the hardline minority of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. At a press conference after the decision, Obama said, "I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that does not violate our Constitution...