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Washington State Dept. Of Licensing V. Cougar Den, Inc.
''Washington State Dep't of Licensing v. Cougar Den, Inc.'', 586 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Yakama Nation Treaty of 1855 preempts the state law which the State purported to be able to tax fuel purchased by a tribal corporation for sale to tribal members. This was a 5-4 plurality decision, with Justice Breyer's opinion being joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Ginsburg, penned a concurring opinion. There were dissenting opinions by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh. Background Facts of the case The Yakama Nation is an American Indian tribe in Washington, located on the Yakama Indian Reservation, on the east side of the Cascade Mountains. In 1855, the tribe signed the Yakama Nation Treaty of 1855, ceding approximately 10,000,000 acres to the United States, but reserving important rights for the tribe and its members. In the treaty, the tribe reserved “the right, in ...
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Supreme Court Of The United States
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point of federal law. It also has original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically "all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party." The court holds the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law. However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction. The court may decide cases having political overtones, but has ruled that it does not have power to decide non-justiciable political questions. Established by Article Three of the United States ...
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Stephen Breyer, SCOTUS Photo Portrait
Stephen or Steven is a common English first name. It is particularly significant to Christians, as it belonged to Saint Stephen ( grc-gre, Στέφανος ), an early disciple and deacon who, according to the Book of Acts, was stoned to death; he is widely regarded as the first martyr (or "protomartyr") of the Christian Church. In English, Stephen is most commonly pronounced as ' (). The name, in both the forms Stephen and Steven, is often shortened to Steve or Stevie. The spelling as Stephen can also be pronounced which is from the Greek original version, Stephanos. In English, the female version of the name is Stephanie. Many surnames are derived from the first name, including Stephens, Stevens, Stephenson, and Stevenson, all of which mean "Stephen's (son)". In modern times the name has sometimes been given with intentionally non-standard spelling, such as Stevan or Stevon. A common variant of the name used in English is Stephan ; related names that have found some curr ...
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Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Court and its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but was frustrated over the church's insufficient attempts to combat racism. He abandoned his aspiration of becoming a clergyman to attend the College of the Holy Cross and, later, Yale Law School, where he was influenced by a number of conservative authors, notably Thomas Sowell, who dramatically shifted his worldview from progressive to ...
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John Roberts
John Glover Roberts Jr. (born January 27, 1955) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as the 17th chief justice of the United States since 2005. Roberts has authored the majority opinion in several landmark cases, including ''National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius,'' '' Shelby County v. Holder'', and '' Riley v. California''. He has been described as having a conservative judicial philosophy but, above all, is an institutionalist. He has shown a willingness to work with the Supreme Court's liberal bloc, and after the retirement of Anthony Kennedy in 2018, he has been regarded as the primary swing vote on the Court. However, Roberts is no longer regarded as the Court's median vote following the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. Roberts grew up in northwestern Indiana and was educated in a series of Catholic schools. He studied history at Harvard University and then attended Harvard Law School, where he was managing e ...
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Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups). Linguists do not typically consider pidgins as full or complete languages. Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language. A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from a multitude of languages as well as onomatopoeia. As the lexicon of any pidgin will be limited to c ...
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Concurring Opinion
In law, a concurring opinion is in certain legal systems a written opinion by one or more judges of a court which agrees with the decision made by the majority of the court, but states different (or additional) reasons as the basis for their decision. When no absolute majority of the court can agree on the basis for deciding the case, the decision of the court may be contained in a number of concurring opinions, and the concurring opinion joined by the greatest number of judges is referred to as the plurality opinion. As a practical matter, concurring opinions are slightly less useful to lawyers than majority opinions. Having failed to receive a majority of the court's votes, concurring opinions are not binding precedent and cannot be cited as such. But concurring opinions can sometimes be cited as a form of persuasive precedent (assuming the point of law is one on which there is no binding precedent already in effect). The conflict in views between a majority opinion and a conc ...
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg ( ; ; March 15, 1933September 18, 2020) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton to replace retiring justice Byron White, and at the time was generally viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. She eventually became part of the liberal wing of the Court as the Court shifted to the right over time. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg wrote notable majority opinions, including ''United States v. Virginia''(1996), '' Olmstead v. L.C.''(1999), '' Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc.''(2000), and '' City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York''(2005). Ginsburg was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her older sister died when she was a baby, and her mother died shortly bef ...
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Neil Gorsuch
Neil McGill Gorsuch ( ; born August 29, 1967) is an American lawyer and judge who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on January 31, 2017, and has served since April 10, 2017. Gorsuch was born in and spent his early life in Denver, Colorado, then lived in Bethesda, Maryland, while attending Georgetown Preparatory School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University, a Juris Doctor from Harvard University, and after practicing law for 15 years, received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in law from the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Marshall Scholar. His doctoral thesis concerned the morality of assisted suicide, under the supervision of the Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis. From 1995 to 2005, Gorsuch was in private practice with the law firm of Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick. He was Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General at the United States Department of ...
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United States District Court
The United States district courts are the trial courts of the United States federal judiciary, U.S. federal judiciary. There is one district court for each United States federal judicial district, federal judicial district, which each cover one U.S. state or, in some cases, a portion of a state. Each district court has at least one courthouse, and many districts have more than one. District courts' decisions are appealed to the United States courts of appeals, U.S. court of appeals for the circuit in which they reside, except for certain specialized cases that are appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit or directly to the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Supreme Court. District courts are courts of common law, law, Court of equity, equity, and Admiralty court, admiralty, and can hear both Civil law (common law), civil and Criminal law, criminal cases. But unlike U.S. state courts, federal dis ...
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Elena Kagan
Elena Kagan ( ; born April 28, 1960) is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010, and has served since August 7, 2010. Kagan is the fourth woman to become a member of the Court. Kagan was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from Princeton University, Worcester College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, she clerked for a federal Court of Appeals judge and for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She began her career as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, leaving to serve as Associate White House Counsel, and later as a policy adviser under President Bill Clinton. After a nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which expired without action, she became a professor at Harvard Law School and was later named its first female dean. In 2009, Kagan became the first female solicitor general of the Unite ...
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