The Supreme Court has responded to Oklahoma's botched execution of Clayton Lockett by agreeing to hear the first lethal injection case since 2008's Baze v. Rees, which held Kentucky's lethal injection protocol constitutional. Since Baze, makers and suppliers of lethal injection drugs have increasingly refused to sell their products to death penalty states, forcing the few states that actively seek to execute death row inmates to adopted untested lethal injection protocols. These states have also developed a new tool to ward off legal challenges: secrecy laws barring access to information about lethal injection drug sources or protocols. Are critics right that these laws violate the First, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments by curtailing the media's access to information, forcing corrections staff to inflict pain on inmates, and violating the due process rights of the executed? Is the use of untested lethal injection protocols constitutional? How do these debates more generally reflect the continued viability of capital punishment in the United States?
Speakers:
- Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Correspondent, The New York Times
- Mark Earley, Founder and Principal, Earley Legal Group; Member, Death Penalty Committee, The Constitution Project
- Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union
- Megan McCracken, Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel, Death Penalty Clinic, University of California, Berkeley School of Law
- Katie Townsend, Litigation Director, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
Currently, 95 colleges and universities are under federal investigation for alleged violations of Title IX based on the mishandling of sexual assault complaints on campus. Academic institutions have ramped up efforts to investigate sexual assaults, and the Obama Administration has announced a task force to tackle the issue and make campuses safer. Meanwhile, some have expressed concern that the due process rights of the accused are not always sufficiently protected. Can universities crack down on sexual violence without violating the due process rights of either the accused or the accusers? How can schools follow through on the promise of Title IX so that women can function as equals in the academic environment while maintaining fairness in the investigation and prosecution of the accused? What would a model policy for dealing with campus sexual assault look like?
Speakers:
- Ari Melber, Chief Legal Correspondent and Co-Host of "The Cycle," MSNBC
- Alexandra Brodsky, Founding Co-Director, Know Your IX; Editor, Feministing.com; Student, Yale Law School
- Seth Galanter, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Department of Education Office for Civil Rights
- Hon. Nancy Gertner, (Ret.) Senior Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
- Fatima Goss Graves, Vice-President, Education & Employment, National Women's Law Center
- Meredith Raimondo, Associate Professor and Title IX Coordinator, Oberlin College
On Saturday, June 13, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg discussed her career, celebrity status, and time on the Supreme Court with her former clerk and current California Associate Justice Goodwin Liu.
ACS interviews Kylie Oversen, UND Law School student and North Dakota state representative, at the 2015 ACS National Convention.
In its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the fundamental right to an abortion while introducing a new "undue burden" standard that has since been used to analyze infringements on that right. However, current events demonstrate that the undue burden standard is not a one-size-fits-all protection against obstacles to abortion. Recent restrictions - such as laws imposing new requirements on medication abortion, laws that require doctors to perform medically unnecessary ultrasounds or read ideological "informed consent" scripts to patients, and TRAP laws that target abortion providers for unwarranted and burdensome regulation - cumulatively, and sometimes individually, threaten to shut down many or most clinics in large swaths of the country. These challenges present new legal questions, including how the First Amendment should protect the speech between a doctor and patient and whether states can arbitrarily treat abortion differently than other comparable medical procedures. In light of the current composition of the court, how can advocates best preserve the fundamental protections afforded in Roe and Casey?
Speakers:
- Jill Filipovic, Senior Political Writer, Cosmopolitan.com
- Walter Dellinger, Partner, O'Melveny & Myers
- Melissa Murray, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley School of Law
- Julie Rikelman, Litigation Director, Center for Reproductive Rights
- Reva Siegel, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School
ACS interviews Jessica Smith, the student member of the ACS Board and the president of the ACS Student Chapter at the Howard University School of Law.
