Policy decisions, Classification, Contracts and Judicial Review

A.    POLICY DECISIONS:

PLD 2007 SC 642: See pages 672(N) and 674(s) for the balance between contractual rights, obligation, interests of the community at large and over-riding necessity.

1978 SCMR 327: At Page 329: “It was further held that in such cases the emphasis is on policy and any discretion vesting in the authorities is directed towards attaining the policy’s objectives.”

1986 SCMR 680: At Page 682: “Government has the right of laying down policy and if it chooses to do so and there is no law on the subject it offends, it is not the right of any Court to throw it out, other than to hold, in any genuine case, that the same is unreasonable or arbitrary.”

PLD 1973 SC 49: See generally for scope of judicial review, trichotomy of powers in our constitutional scheme.

Persecution of Ahmadis in the Islamic Republic

The basic premise on which we won ourselves Pakistan was that a permanent majority cannot and should not dominate a permanent minority on account of numeric strength. Yet contrary to that founding logic, Pakistan is today legally a totalitarian fundamentalist theocracy

A fresh round of hate has been unleashed against the hapless Ahmediyya community once again. A young woman has been expelled from her university for daring to stand up to hate speech against her community on campus in Lahore. In Rawalpindi, ignorant and boorish mobs have been agitating to close down an Ahmedi ‘place of worship’ for being ‘unconstitutional’. In other words, practising their own faith in their own space is deemed unconstitutional by a mob that has probably never opened the constitution. All the while this community goes on praying and fasting for Pakistan, where a majority continues to persecute them for believing differently.

Constitutional right to privacy

Right of privacy v. polygamy laws

As much as I find the practise of polygamy out of place in modern society, litigants in this case have a solid argument.

By JENNIFER DOBNER, Associated Press – 3 hours ago 

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Attorneys for a polygamous family made famous on a reality television show on Friday asked a Utah federal judge not to block their challenge of the state's bigamy law.
Kody Brown and wives Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn filed a lawsuit in Salt Lake City's U.S. District Court in July.

New York Times v. Sullivan

Facts of the Case 

Decided together with Abernathy v. Sullivan, this case concerns a full-page ad in the New York Times which alleged that the arrest of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. for perjury in Alabama was part of a campaign to destroy King's efforts to integrate public facilities and encourage blacks to vote. L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery city commissioner, filed a libel action against the newspaper and four black ministers who were listed as endorsers of the ad, claiming that the allegations against the Montgomery police defamed him personally. Under Alabama law, Sullivan did not have to prove that he had been harmed; and a defense claiming that the ad was truthful was unavailable since the ad contained factual errors. Sullivan won a $500,000 judgment.

40 Key US Cases

By Anonymous

1. marbury v. madison 1803
   established judicial review; power of the supreme court is supreme in deciding cases as unconstitutional or not
2. McCulloch v. Maryland 1819
   established national supremacy and implied powers; the use of the elastic clause==> state unable to tax.
3. Dred Scott v. Stanford 1857
   
   • ruled that
   • 1. fed govt cant ban slavery from territores
   • 2. blacks whether slaves or free were never citizens

US Case Law on Fundamental Rights

These cases are excerpted from a New York Times article.

1. Kelo v. City of New London 545 U.S. 469 (2005)

This is a classic case of balancing private property rights and the public good. The city of New London, Conn., having lost traditional industries, needed economic development to reverse urban decay. But could private companies get rich in the process? The Supreme Court found that economic development under the city’s plan would not violate the Fifth Amendment (which prohibits the taking of private property for public use “without just compensation”) solely because there was some private gain.

2. Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 551 U.S. 701 (2007)

 Can a city school board use race or ethnic identity as a factor in school admittance? I tell my students that if they want to understand modern American society, they should study both the evolving idea of equal protection and the history behind it: slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education. But the concept continues to evolve, as is shown by this case; in it, the Supreme Court, while recognizing that school districts have a compelling interest in diversity, ruled against school district plans that used race as a factor in assigning students to public schools.

3. Stanford v. Kentucky 492 U.S. 361 (1989) and Roper v. Simmons 543 U.S. 551 (2005)

Can the death penalty be imposed on a defendant who committed murder as a juvenile? In a 1989 case in Kentucky, the Supreme Court held that executing a juvenile offender did not violate “common standards of decency,” or the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment. But it reversed this decision in 2005, finding that the standards had evolved to a point at which such executions were unconstitutional.