The Supreme Court, which reconvened last week for its 222nd session with new Justice Elena Kagan, will be considering at least 52 cases during the next few months. Included in the docket are cases that focus on immigration reform, tax breaks for donations to private schools and First Amendment rights.
Potential issues that could be added to the docket include cases on terrorism, same-sex marriage and recent health care reform.
“The Supreme Court literally affects every aspect of American life, whether you are a student, a private person or a corporation,” said UCLA lecturer Cynthia Lebow, who teaches a class on the Supreme Court. “They are interpreting the Constitution that is the supreme law of the land and determining what public policy will be.”
Two of the higher profile and relevant cases appear below:
Flores-Villar v. United States
Currently, if an unmarried couple has a child abroad, the child is granted citizenship only if the mother is a U.S. citizen. If only the father is a citizen, he must fulfill a list of statutory requirements before his child can be granted citizenship.
“For some students on campus, this may be their situation. This can have an enormous impact on what their citizenship status will be in this country,” Lebow said.
The prosecution says this is gender bias and argues for equal protection under the fifth amendment for the citizen parent, regardless of whether they are the mother or the father.
“(The 14th Amendment says) that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are subject to law here,” Lebow said. “That is being challenged here as part of the whole immigration debate.”
The defense, however, refers to the path to citizenship set forth in the first article of the Constitution, which primarily asserts that physical-presence requirements can apply to parents of foreign-born children, married or not.
Diego Sepulveda, a fourth-year Chicana and Chicano studies student, said he was concerned about the long-term effects the ruling may have, as he is involved with IDEAS, a student group that advocates immigration reform and supports undocumented students.
“The thing about that is that a lot of children come from broken families,” Sepulveda said. “Let’s say a child only has a father, that child won’t be able to get citizenship.”
According to Sepulveda, without citizenship, students would be precluded from higher education, from receiving financial aid, work study or loans.
Snyder v. Phelps
Corporal Matthew Snyder died in Iraq in 2006.
At his funeral, members of the Westboro Baptist Church came to protest against the casualties of war. Originally from Kansas, the church group now travels the country to demonstrate at the funerals of those who have died in combat.
The group says the deaths of military personnel are God’s punishment for the increasing tolerance of homosexuality and abortion among other things.
“In this case, the mourners didn’t even see the protesters in the funeral,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. “The mourners only learned about the protest after the fact on the Web. This is not a great case for the court, to protect funeral protesters.”
The debate brings to the forefront a conflict between two major rights ““ the church’s freedom to protest and the corporal’s family’s right to privacy.
“Legally, it’s political speech, and the First Amendment protects all political speech no matter where and when it is given,” said Rebecca Abel, a second-year law student who also works for the UCLA Law Review.
Though the case is focused on hate speech at funerals, Winkler said the consequences of the high court’s ruling could potentially be extrapolated, testing the limits of freedom of speech.
UCLA’s current Code of Conduct forbids the harassment of others through words or gestures, including any forms of hate speech. Student discipline procedures can result in further action from the Office of the Dean.
“If the court protests this offensive speech, they may set the groundwork for upholding hate speech codes on university campuses,” Winkler said. “If the court upholds the restriction of speech on this case, it might provide better justification for hate speech codes.”