Supreme Court

On Thursday, the day the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, a 47-year-old Baltimore woman went to the drugstore, and pulled out her debit card to pay for a prescription refill. But she didn't have enough money in the account to cover the $425 charge. So she asked the pharmacist and staff for a favor. "I asked them to break up the prescription to give me one-third," says the woman, who would not allow her name to be published because she didn't want to disclose her medical conditions.

Maryland's counties and Baltimore face a collective loss of more than $40 million a year and some taxpayers could get refunds if a decision by the state's highest court isn't reversed on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state Court of Appeals ruled in January that Maryland must offer a credit to taxpayers with some types of out-of-state income to offset the local piggyback tax. Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler asked the court to reconsider that decision, but it rejected that request last week.

I am not usually nostalgic for the bad old days. I leave that peculiar form of melancholy and memory to others.I have friends who look back with fondness at the grammar school teachers they feared and the high school coaches they despised. I know elders who transform the mud and pain of World War II into a landscape of foxhole friendships. I read memoirs by people who water down the cold anxious hunger of the Depression with the phrase, ''Well, we were poor but we didn't know it.''I rarely share such revisionist emotions.

In disputing an article, follow these simple steps:  1. Call your opponent a name.  2. Refrain from addressing the original point. 3. Introduce an irrelevant subject.  4. Deny evidence.  5. (Optional) Do not trouble overmuch with spelling and grammar.    I am indebted to Oldcrowandwater, from whose comment on my post "The most famous umbrella since Neville Chamberlain went to Munich"  I was able to divine the essential steps: What a tool.

As rapidly evolving technological advances allow people to be tracked by global positioning devices found in most new cellphones, Congress and courthouses nationwide are trying to balance privacy rights with the needs of law enforcement to locate criminals. Maryland U.S. District Judge Susan K. Gauvey recently refused to issue a warrant sought by federal authorities to find a suspect through his cellphone's GPS data, saying the government was trying to use technology in a new way — "not to collect evidence of a crime, but solely to locate a charged defendant.

When one person's ability to make himself heard is may times superior to that of his neighbor, that first person can overpower the voice of the second and drown it out. When this is done, the second person's right to free expression has been denied because such drowned-out speech does not exist in any practical sense if nobody hears it. The Supreme Court, in ruling that there shall be no limits on corporate donations to political candidates, empowered...

WHEN ELBERT Tuttle arrived in Atlanta in the 1920s to begin his legal career, his neighbors no doubt speculated in whispered tones that he must be one of those "Reconstruction Republicans" who had come to meddle in the affairs of the South. Little did they -- or he himself, for that matter -- know just how right they were.Elbert Parr Tuttle, who died 10 days ago, sound of mind to the very end of his 98 years, exemplified that vanishing species known as "the Eisenhower judge" -- the federal magistrates who assumed the thankless task of reshaping the social landscape of the South for all time.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court has broadened the right of criminal defendants to object to the use of race in jury selection.The 7-to-2 ruling significantly expanded on a 1986 Supreme Court decision that permitted defendants to object to the prosecution's use of peremptory challenges to exclude members of the defendant's race from a jury.The court yesterday declared in an opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy that the use of racial criteria in the government's selection of a jury is unconstitutional regardless of the race of the defendant or of the excluded jurors.

I heartily concur with your concerns about the Supreme Court's recent decision revising the 1969 Miranda ruling ("Eroding Miranda," June 2). This ruling constituted a clear defense against self-incrimination to an individual suspected of a crime. The new decision makes it more difficult for a suspect to invoke this right. It is unclear, in this case, whether the suspect understood this right, but he clearly should not have been questioned further in the absence of an explicit indication — his signature — that he understood his rights and chose not to invoke them.

The 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court allowing corporations to pour millions into federal elections is frightening and dangerous ("And now, the deluge," Jan. 25). Even more alarming is that many of us never saw it coming. In fact this "gem" really took me by surprise. I cringe to think where the Citizens United v. FEC decision will lead. In coming campaigns, corporations will be lining up to shovel funds into their favorite candidates' war chests. If Americans took greater interest in local politics, such a judicial bombshell would not be so troublesome.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. - Louis D. Brandeis Just a few words and little thought separate yet another stronghold of the American economy from ruin. It doesn't have to be that way. The U.S. patent system has made America's biotech and pharmaceutical industries the envy of the world. This month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case posing the question: "Are human genes patentable?"

A lawyer for John Joseph Merzbacher, a former Catholic school teacher imprisoned for raping a student decades ago, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case after a federal appeals court rejected an earlier argument that he should be set free. In a 21-page petition, Merzbacher's attorney H. Mark Stichel asks the high court to resolve several legal questions, including whether a defendant's claim that he would have taken a plea deal if offered, even while proclaiming his innocence, demonstrates a "reasonable probability" that he would have followed through.

Cellphones and the Internet have not only altered the way we communicate, they have changed the way we can injure one another. The telecommunications revolution has created the capability of causing far greater harm to children than the bullying many of us remember from when we were young. The omnipresent nature of the Internet means that there is no place for the child who is victimized to hide. Not even one's home is a safe haven when repeated, vicious attacks appear on Facebook and Twitter.

The Supreme Court left in doubt Monday whether gun owners have a Second-Amendment right to carry a firearm in public, declining to hear a case about concealed-carry laws that is similar to a Maryland suit that still has life in federal courts. Without a comment or dissent, the justices turned down a gun-rights challenge to the New York law, which strictly limits who can legally carry a weapon on the streets. To obtain a concealed carry permit, New Yorkers must convince a county official that they have a "special need for protection" that goes beyond living or working in a high-crime area.

Regardless of whether the Supreme Court is ready to declare a constitutional right to gay marriage, it has the responsibility to fully recognize the decisions Maryland and eight other states, plus the District of Columbia, have made to allow same-sex couples to wed. There is little other conclusion that could be drawn from the arguments today on the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which banned all federal recognition of same-sex...

"Make me wanna holler, way they do my life. " -- Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues" Karen Houppert has written a book of nightmares. Ms. Houppert, a veteran reporter for, among others, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is the author of "Chasing Gideon: the Elusive Quest for Poor People's Justice," which comes out this week coincident with the anniversary of a legal milestone. It was 50 years ago Monday that the case of Gideon v. Wainwright was decided. Clarence Earl Gideon, 51, was arrested in Panama City, Fla., in 1961 for burglary.

The U.S. Supreme Court this morning upheld Maryland's new Congressional map, clearing up one last legal question and affirming that the state's prison population can be counted at their last known address. The new method of counting prisoners was adopted after Sen. Catherine Pugh, of Baltimore, successfully pushed legislation intended to boost population in the city. Previously prisoners were counted at their correctional institutions, a practice that critics said unfairly increased the population of prison towns.

Nothing has focused as much attention on the Supreme Court since the 2000 Florida election recount case as last week's arguments over the constitutionality of President Obama's health care act. The outcome, expected this summer, will hang ominously over this year's presidential campaign until then, and beyond. Already the radio and television airwaves, the Internet, newspaper accounts and commentary are filled with descriptions of the exchanges between the lawyers arguing pro and con before the justices who will decide the fate of the controversial law. Most of these observations are second-hand, based on transcripts and on audio recordings only fairly recently permitted, because television cameras are barred.

Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan will visit a new, $112 million building next month that will house the University of Baltimore School of Law, school officials said Monday. The John and Frances Angelos Law Center, which has been under construction since 2010 and is an anchor of development in the North Charles Street corridor, will also host Gov. Martin O'Malley and Maryland Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell during a series of opening celebrations next month.

How fitting that after Republicans lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, plus lost the popular vote for Congress by over a million votes - and only hold on to their majority in the House by vigorous gerrymandering - the Supreme Court is poised to further erode our constitutional right to vote ("High court split clouds Voting Rights Act's fate," Feb.28). When has this activist court ever missed a chance to legislate losing right-wing Republican policies from the bench?