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The article focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to reinstate a voting map for the Washington State Legislature, which a federal judge had found to discriminate against Hispanic voters. Topics discussed include the legal dispute over the redistricting process, the court's decision not to provide reasons for its action, and the arguments presented by both sides regarding the impact of the new voting map.

Reports on a Tacoma, Washington federal judge's claim that the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman is constitutional. Provisions of the law; Variation in each state's application of the law; Issue regarding the constitutionality of the marriage law.

The article reports on the decision of Supreme Court to consider the rights of parents of 15-year-old Mexican Sergio Hernández Guereca., to filed claims against American boder guard Jesus Mesa Jr. for his death in the U.S. courts on February 21, 2017.

The article reports that the justices at a Supreme Court argument in Washington on October 31, 2016 have asked whether the designs of the uniforms of cheerleaders were subject to copyright protection.

Examines the dispute over a Web site, produced by William Sheehan, that publishes certain demographic information on police officers in Washington (State). Reaction of state officials who fear the information on the Web site invites identity theft; How Sheehan legally obtains the information, which include police officers' home address, telephone numbers, and Social Security numbers, and the questions his use of the personal data raises; Comments from Larry Erickson, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs; Results of a court case in 1989 regarding the ability of reporters to access information from court records using the Freedom of Information Act; Indications that the courts will unlikely interfere with the dissemination of information once it has been legally obtained.

The article reports on the agreement of the Supreme Court in Washington on January 4, 2013 to consider cases concerning the adoption of American Indian children and whether federal judges may play a role in plea negotiations.

The article focuses on a television interview with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia over the toughest decision he had made. Justice Scalia recalls the case regarding the adoption of a child of a couple on an Indian reservation by a rich rancher but a federal law, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, required tribal courts to decide for the case. Recently, Scalia mentions the case involving a South Carolina couple who were ordered to turn over a 27-month-old girl to her biological father.

The article focuses on the hearing of the U.S. Supreme Court on the patents held by Utah gene company Myriad Genetics. It mentions that scientists and doctors who challenged the patents say that their ability to help patients and research had been frustrated. Moreover, Judge Alan D. Lourie notes that the isolated DNA molecules before them are man-made and not found in nature.

The article focuses on the agreement of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case involving Floyd Perkins of Michigan, which demonstrates why the issue related too innocence can be difficult. It says that the request of Perkins to drop out his conviction was denied by magistrate judge Timothy P. Greeley because it was filed too late. It adds that the recommendation of Greeley was accepted by judge Robert Holmes Bell, although Perkins has appealed on the court.

WASHINGTON -- Law enforcement officials in Maryland may continue to collect DNA samples from people charged with violent felonies while the Supreme Court considers whether to hear an appeal on the constitutionality of the practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ruled on Monday in a brief order granting a stay of a state court decision. In April, the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that a state law authorizing DNA collection from people arrested but not yet convicted violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Children conceived with a dead father's frozen sperm are not entitled to Social Security benefits if they were not eligible to inherit property from him under state law, the Supreme Courtruled unanimously on Monday. The case concerned twins born to Karen Capato 18 months after the death of her husband, Robert, in 2002. The Social Security Administration denied the twins survivors' benefits, a determination the Supreme Court endorsed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case concerning the government's use of electronic surveillance to monitor the international communications of people suspected of having ties to terrorist groups. The court also issued three decisions, including one denying Social Security benefits to children who were conceived through artificial insemination after their father's death. SURVEILLANCE The justices agreed to decide whether a challenge may proceed to a 2008 federal law that broadened the government's power to monitor international communications. The law, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, followed disclosure of the Bush administration's secret program to wiretap international communications without obtaining court warrants in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The most versatile of the classic Anglo-Saxon swear words has, diligent research reveals, made just one appearance in oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The cursing, in 1971, probably won the case, which concerned the prosecution of a vulgar protest against the draft during the Vietnam War. By repeating the word in court, the protester's lawyer showed that it could have a role in public discourse. Over the next two decades or so, the word was used in nine Supreme Court decisions, typically in quotations of something a criminal had said. Its last appearance was in 1993. Popular culture has grown coarser over the years, and the word is commonplace in hit songs and ubiquitous on cable television. The Supreme Court has moved in the opposite direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Justices across the ideological spectrum appeared inclined on Wednesday to uphold a controversial part of Arizona's aggressive 2010 immigration law, based on their questions at a Supreme Court argument. ''You can see it's not selling very well,'' Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the court's liberal wing and its first Hispanic justice, told Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., referring to a central part of his argument against the measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Courtconsidered on Monday whether representatives of pharmaceutical companies who visit doctors' offices to promote their companies' products are entitled to overtime. The answer turns on whether those visits are sales calls or something else. Paul D. Clement, a lawyer for the defendant, GlaxoSmithKline, said the plaintiffs ''are two pharmaceutical sales representatives.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Criminal defendants have a constitutional right to effective lawyers during plea negotiations, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in a pair of 5-to-4 decisions that vastly expanded judges' supervision of the criminal justice system. The decisions mean that what used to be informal and unregulated deal making is now subject to new constraints when bad legal advice leads defendants to reject favorable plea offers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The ostensible question at a Supreme Court argument on Monday was how large a role the jury must play in setting fines against corporations found guilty of environmental crimes. But the real issue in the case, as the justices' questioning made clear, was whether the court remained committed to the logic of a 2000 decision that said the Constitution sometimes bars judges from making factual findings that lead to increased punishments. The case arose from the conviction of the Southern Union Company for storing mercury, a hazardous waste, without a permit. The law the company violated allowed fines up to $50,000 a day, and the government contended that the company had violated the law for 762 days. That would have added up to about $38 million. The trial judge imposed penalties of about $18 million. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- If the Obama administration persuades the Supreme Court to uphold its health care overhaul law, it will be in large part thanks to a 70-year-old precedent involving an Ohio farmer named Roscoe C. Filburn. Mr. Filburn sued to overturn a 1938 federal law that told him how much wheat he could grow on his family farm and made him pay a penalty for every extra bushel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- In 1952, a young Supreme Court clerk wrote a memorandum that would come to haunt him. The court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, the great school desegregation case. The question for the justices was whether to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that said ''separate but equal'' facilities were constitutional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The question before the Supreme Court on Tuesday was whether lawsuits against corporations for some kinds of human rights violations are categorically forbidden. Some of the justices were themselves in a categorical mood, announcing not only their answer to that question but also to a larger one not squarely before them. They did so by quoting approvingly or skeptically from the briefs in the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Over the course of an hourlong argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court seemed gradually to accept that it might be able to uphold a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, notwithstanding the First Amendment's free speech guarantees. The justices were aided by suggestions from the government about how to limit the scope of a possible ruling in its favor and by significant concessions from a lawyer for the defendant. The case arose from a lie told in 2007 at a public meeting by Xavier Alvarez, an elected member of the board of directors of a water district in Southern California. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- In a busy day at the Supreme Court, the justices on Tuesday issued a decision limiting the circumstances in which prisoners must be told of their rights before they are questioned, added to what had already been a long schedule for arguments in the challenges to the 2010 health care law and made public an internal ethics resolution from 1991. The question in the case concerning prisoners, Howes v. Fields, No. 10-680, was whether an inmate's confession to a sex crime should have been suppressed because he did not receive the familiar warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona before he was questioned. The answer turned on whether he was in custody at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- In a 2003 decision that the majority said it expected would last for 25 years, the Supreme Court allowed public colleges and universities to take account of race in admission decisions. On Tuesday, the court signaled that it might end such affirmative action much sooner than that. By agreeing to hear a major case involving race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas, the court thrust affirmative action back into the public and political discourse after years in which it had mostly faded from view. Both supporters and opponents of affirmative action said they saw the announcement -- and the change in the court's makeup since 2003 -- as a signal that the court's five more conservative members might be prepared to do away with racial preferences in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Washington BACK in 2006, before the Obama administration made leak prosecutions routine, a panel of three federal appeals court judges in New York struggled to decide whether a prosecutor should be allowed to see the phone records of two New York Times reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, in an effort to determine their sources for articles about Islamic charities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- In a rollicking Supreme Court argument that was equal parts cultural criticism and First Amendment doctrine, the justices on Tuesday considered whether the government still had good reason to regulate cursing and nudity on broadcast television. The legal bottom line was not easy to discern, though there seemed to be little sentiment for a sweeping overhaul of the current system, which subjects broadcasters to fines for showing vulgar programming that is constitutionally protected when presented on cable television or the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Teresa R. Wagner is a conservative Republican who wants to teach law. Her politics may have hurt her career. An official of the University of Iowa College of Law, where Ms. Wagner applied for a job in 2006, certainly seemed to think so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The lawyers were listless and the justices lively at a Supreme Courtargument on Tuesday on how prosecutors may use crime laboratory reports at a trial. The issue was making its third appearance at the court since a groundbreaking 5-to-4 decision in 2009 that said such reports may not be used in criminal trials unless the analysts responsible for creating them provide live testimony. In a follow-up decision in June, also by a 5-to-4 vote, the court said that only the analyst who did the work, rather than a colleague or supervisor, would do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Secret Service agents protecting Vice President Dick Cheney may be sued for violating the free speech rights of a member of the public who made critical remarks about the Bush administration's war policies. The case arose from an episode in 2006 at a mall in Beaver Creek, Colo. A Secret Service agent said he heard Steven Howards say into a cellphone that he planned to ask Mr. Cheney ''how many kids he's killed today.'' Mr. Howards later approached Mr. Cheney and said the administration's ''policies in Iraq are disgusting.'' Mr. Howards then touched Mr. Cheney on the shoulder in a gesture variously described as an open-handed pat, a slap and a strike that caused the vice president's shoulder to dip. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Not long ago, a law professor at Harvard received a routine request. Would he add his name to a brief from a group of law professors urging a federal court to uphold the health care overhaul law? The professor, Richard H. Fallon Jr., said he would not, and his assessment of what he had been asked to sign was cutting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The justices seemed divided during arguments on Monday over whether the Supreme Court should wade into a dispute between Congress and the executive branch over the status of Jerusalem. But the justices' debate was about means rather than ends, as a decision in favor of the executive branch seemed likely whether the court stepped in or abstained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Congress can make it a crime to lie about having earned a military decoration. The case arose from the prosecution of Xavier Alvarez under a 2005 law, the Stolen Valor Act. Mr. Alvarez, an elected member of the board of directors of a water district in Southern California, described his background at a public meeting in 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court considered on Wednesday whether the Constitution places limits on strip-searches of people entering jails, and quickly confronted two separate line-drawing problems, both involving the task of balancing dignity against security. One concerned who may be searched. The other asked how intrusive the search may be. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Jimi Hendrix made an appearance at the Supreme Court on Wednesday in an argument over whether Congress acted constitutionally in 1994 by restoring copyright protection to foreign works that had once been in the public domain. The affected works included films by Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, books by C. S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, symphonies by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and paintings by Picasso. The suit challenging the law was brought by orchestra conductors, teachers and film archivists who say they had relied for years on the free availability of such works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- If laws forbidding discrimination in employment applied fully to religious groups, the government could insist that the Roman Catholic Church allow women to serve as priests. If such laws do not apply to religious groups at all, a church could fire a janitor because he is black. At Supreme Courtarguments on Wednesday, the justices struggled to find a theory that would strike the right balance between avoiding government interference in the internal affairs of religious groups while protecting employees from discrimination. They often seemed frustrated by the available approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- Members of the Supreme Court appeared frustrated Wednesday during an argument about whether poor people facing jail time for failing to pay child support are entitled to court-appointed lawyers. It seemed that there were procedural and practical problems with almost every potential ruling. ''It's a little difficult to write the opinion if you are to prevail,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told a lawyer arguing that lawyers are not always required. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- ''The duty of the Justice Department is to defend statutes that have been passed by Congress, unless there is some very compelling reason not to,'' Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said during his 2009 confirmation hearings. ''Very compelling'' is a high bar, and for good reason. The executive branch is ordinarily in the business of enforcing laws, not arguing that they should be nullified. Even when an administration believes a law to be bad policy or subject to plausible constitutional attack, the Justice Department almost always defends it in court. Congress enacted the law, after all, and a president has signed it. It would be an odd system in which the Justice Department routinely overrode those determinations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON In the year since the Supreme Court handed down its 183-page decision in Citizens United, the liberal objection to it has gradually boiled down to a single sentence: The majority was wrong to grant First Amendment rights to corporations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON How funny is the Supreme Court? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON At her confirmation hearings last year, Sonia Sotomayor spent a lot of time assuring senators that empathy would play no part in her work on the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a First Amendment challenge to an Arizona law that provides matching funds to candidates who accept public financing. The law, enacted in 1998, gives an initial sum to candidates for state office who accept public financing. Then it provides additional matching funds based on the amounts spent by privately financed opponents and by independent groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON Elven J. Swisher wore a replica of a Purple Heart on the witness stand when he testified that the defendant had tried to hire him to kill three federal officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WASHINGTON -- An enormous trove of e-mail messages from Elena Kagan's years in the Clinton White House released late Friday afternoon offered glimpses of a savvy, sharp-elbowed and sometimes salty-tongued lawyer at ease with politics, policy and bureaucratic infighting. The messages, released by the Clinton Presidential Library, were mostly short and bland. Many involved scheduling, rescheduling and canceling meetings. But they occasionally touched on matters of substance during Ms. Kagan's four-year tenure in the administration, in which she served first as an associate White House counsel, then as deputy director of the Domestic Policy Counsel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- Ronald Kempfert was a young boy in 1975 when his father was sent to prison for murder, and they had no contact for 28 years. Then, in 2003, Mr. Kempfert heard from a lawyer who had been looking into the case. ''Your father is innocent,'' said the lawyer, Larry A. Hammond. ''And we're pretty sure your mother framed him.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON -- As is his custom, Justice John Paul Stevens did not ask a question on Wednesday until the lawyer before him had almost finished his argument. When Justice Stevens did speak up, it was in a seeming effort to guide his colleagues on the Supreme Court toward what he considered to be the central argument advanced by the death row inmate in the case. ''Let me just ask,'' Justice Stevens said, ''is this the case in which the claim is he's ineligible for the death penalty?'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WASHINGTON Opponents of same-sex marriage have long said the issue does not belong in the courts. Lately they have gone a step further. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For three days last week, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. heard arguments in a real court in Washington. Then he came to New York to preside over a fake one -- the finals of the moot court competition at Columbia Law School. Though he looked a little weary, Chief Justice Roberts's questions were deft, and his wit was dry. A few of his remarks, during and after the argument, lit up a large lecture hall like summer lightning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Washington Supreme Court ruling on the state law dealing lies from politicians. On October 4, 2007, the court said that the concerned law was unconstitutional. The court gave the order with a 5-to-4 vote. The majority was of the view that giving right to government, rather than the people, to decide about political debates clashes with the First Amendment. However, many U.S. states have laws that make it unlawful to say false things about political candidates.

The article reports that in a defiant decision, a federal appeals court in Washington conceded that it was ignoring parts of a 2004 Supreme Court decision on the rights of a man held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Supreme Court has ruled almost three years ago that detainees possess fundamental right to challenge the justness of their confinement in court by filing petitions for writs of habes corpus.

The article reports that Washington's Supreme Court has upheld the ban imposed on same-sex marriage by a state law.