This has been a crazy few weeks for judicial law. We had the seemingly stunning decision on the VRA, but there was also the Salinas decision, which essentially determined that unless you specifically invoke your Fifth Amendment rights, not only will anything you say be held against you in a court of law, your silence may be used to implicate you in a crime as well. This chops away at the well-known Miranda rights. We also had the ruling on Affirmative Action programs which was upheld for now, but does seem to indicate that the availability of these programs will become scarcer as the Court increasingly feels that our society no longer needs these programs (or else why would they strike down Section 4 of VRA). And finally, we had the Sekhar decision which re-defines property. This case is really complicated, but what scares me is that this was a guy who used a person’s private life against them in order to compel them to behave a certain way. While that sounds like plain old extortion to me, somehow, the judges didn’t see this as a problem. They instead said, “Well, he influenced the guy to invest in something he didn’t want to and since an investment is not ‘transferable property’ per se, that’s ok.” So all in all, and as my friend and I surmised, this is where America seems to be this Judicial Season: We can marry whomever we want now. That’s good. But, we will have a difficult time voting in some places, our silence won’t be golden when a crime is involved, we can use someone’s private misgivings for personal gain so long as no real property is being affected, nothing is private anymore and finally, some of us will have less opportunities to improve any of the above by educating ourselves because the programs that sought to overlook the sometimes dire circumstances we were living in for generations may no longer exist in the very near future. A great day to be American? I guess that’s relative. But it seems to me that we gained a lot this season. And lost a whole lot more……
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 19:32:33 +0000
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