New Rockford Transcript - Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883

Racial discrimination in southern hotels and restaurants throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Congress determined in 1964 through hearings and studies, had created for Black Americans great challenges and difficulties in their desire to travel fro...

The immense pressures inflicted on the United States by the Great Depression of the 1930s forced the Supreme Court on several occasions to confront the scope of a state’s police power to regulate economic activity in the name of the general...

In 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling that, to this day, ranks as one of the most important victories ever rendered for farmers in American legal history. The decision rewarded Midwestern farmers for their...

Former Vice President Mike Pence plans to invoke the Speech or Debate Clause as justification for challenging a subpoena issued by Special Counsel Jack Smith in his investigation of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020...

President Joe Biden’s delivery of what has become the annual State of the Union address fulfilled one of the few constitutional obligations imposed upon the nation’s chief executive. What were the framers of the Constitution thinking when they...

The difficulties that college and university administrators from California to Massachusetts have faced over the past 30 years in protecting their students from harassment, within the context of America’s constitutional commitment to freedom of...

Questions surrounding news that President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence have disclosed possession of classified documents in their homes justify interruption of this column’s weekly focus on landmark Supreme Court rulings. Curious...

Half a century later, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) remains the Supreme Court’s authoritative ruling on symbolic speech and the First Amendment rights of K-12 students to express their political views. Delivered...

In a tragic, landmark ruling of historic dimensions, the Supreme Court, in 1927, in an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, upheld the forced sterilization of a Virginia woman erroneously characterized by the state as...

Congressman-Elect, George Santos’s (R-NY) sweeping distortions of his personal and professional biography has triggered nationwide calls for the House of Representatives to prevent him from assuming his seat in the 118th Congress. Americans have...

In this season of peace, remembrance and celebration, we are beckoned by the ghosts of 1776 and 1787 to recall the historic work of this nation’s founders in establishing a republic grounded in the aspirational principles of liberty, equality and s...

For the generation that framed and adopted the Constitution, legislative despotism was not merely theoretical, but real. The Founders’ fears were drawn from their experience under Parliament, which saddled an aspiring Republic with laws that...

Constitutionally speaking, a former President may be prosecuted  It is unclear if the Department of Justice will charge former President Donald Trump with four crimes referred by the January 6 Committee, but there should be no doubt,...

Donald Trump’s call to terminate the constitution  As the entire world knows by now, former President Donald Trump, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, has called for the “termination” of the Constitution to overturn the 2020...

The public role of religion in American life, long a challenging issue for the Supreme Court in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, commanded nationwide attention in 1984 when a lawsuit was brought against Pawtucket,...

At this juncture in American history, when the citizenry seems to require frequent reminders of the landmark decisions and actions that poured and preserved the foundation of our constitutional democracy, we would do well to recall the transformative...

The enormous pressures and hardships—financial, medical and psychological-- inflicted on the citizenry by the Great Depression required creative governmental responses that stressed the limits of the Constitution. In the face of the nation’s...

 Two hundred years ago, in the landmark case of Cohens v. Virginia (1821), the future of our Constitution, the aspirations of national unity, and the status and role of the federal judiciary itself, were before the Supreme Court. We have seldom...

 The controversial use by college admission committees of an applicant’s race was the subject of a five-hour hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court this week in cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The lengthy o...

The 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr, lost in the mists of early American legal history stirs, at most, only feint recollections among members of the Bar, let alone the general public. But Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark ruling that the pres...

In 1996, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark opinion in United States v. Virginia that exalted women’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by ending the 157-year-old tradition of all-male education at the Virginia Mili...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s long, tortured road to recognizing women’s constitutional rights in the late 20th Century was preceded by victories based, not on the principle of their equality, but on the perception of their inferiority. The Court had...

Not every landmark Supreme Court decision champions the rights of Americans or limits governmental power in a manner that preserves and protects our constitutional democracy. Some seminal rulings shock the conscience, rock the foundation of the...

American legal history firmly rejects the view advanced by some commentators and politicians that the president, not Congress, may decide when to initiate war. It was, of course, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of rulings at the dawn...

Little v. Barreme, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1804, may be among the least familiar landmark rulings ever rendered, but it settled momentous constitutional and legal questions that plumb the depths of American history. In an opinion...