In the US someone can set up a bogus church and proceed to fleece people by getting them to donate money, even what they cannot afford. Those donations are tax deductible and the pastors get to live the high life with fancy houses, private jets and the like at our expense. The government will not touch them because as soon as they do, people will scream ‘religious persecution’.
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The death of Antonin Scalia has cost Dow Chemical corporation about a billion dollars. As David Dayen explains:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was worth billions of dollars to corporate America, if a Dow Chemical settlement made public Friday is any indication.
Dow was in the midst of appealing a $1.06 billion class-action antitrust ruling, after a jury found that it had conspired with other chemical companies to fix prices for urethane, a material used in furniture and appliances.
But because of Scalia’s death and the sudden unlikelihood of finding five votes on the Supreme Court to overturn the case, Dow decided to settle for $835 million, the bulk of the original award.
Glenn Greenwald writes about the absurd umbrage taken by two right wing law professors at Georgetown University law school when some of their colleagues demurred at the effusive praise given to the late justice Antonin Scalia by the dean of the school.
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Tessa Stuart rounds up a list of potential nominees to replace deceased Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia. Of course, all such lists are purely speculative. The Obama administration will keep its deliberations close to the vest, unless they decide to leak some names to test reactions prior to any announcement.
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Justice Antonin Scalia’s death has thrown a spanner into a carefully planned union-busting legal strategy. Opponents of unions have long sought to overturn a 1977 Supreme Court precedent known as Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that allowed unions to collect fees from non-union members to cover the costs incurred in contract negotiations and enforcement that benefited even the non-union members. Opponents of unions had argued that unions can use those fees to promote political views and thus they were being forced into speech that they do not agree with.
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Michael Newdow is the atheist who at one time argued before the US Supreme Court that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance that school children say in school violated the Establishment Clause and was thus unconstitutional. The court ruled against him on a technicality that he was at the time not the legal custodian of his daughter, the one in whose name the suit was brought, and thus lacked standing. His later attempts to rectify that issue by representing other children did not succeed at the Appeals Court level and he gave up on it.
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A court case has resulted in a victory for transgender rights. It rests upon what may seem to be an esoteric aspect of law but it has important consequences. This issue is what standard to use when an arm of government takes action that affect individuals. As Lyle Denniston explains, there are three levels of scrutiny that can be used.
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Growing up in Sri Lanka, I went to a private school that had rules for how one should behave and what one could do even outside of school hours and off school property. For example, one could not go to see films on weekdays because one was supposed to be studying and not indulging in such frivolous behavior. My parents ignored this rule because I was doing well in school anyway.
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After the US Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, I assumed that it was now legal everywhere within the US. But it turns out that I was wrong because I had not realized that since the tribal lands are sovereign, the US constitution does not apply within their boundaries and eleven of them continue to outlaw such unions
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The foes of the right to abortions have used the heavily and misleadingly edited videos produced by a group called the Center for Medical Progress to fuel anger at Planned Parenthood and other women’s health groups that conduct abortions as part of their services. Carly Fiorina was one of those who further embellished what she had purportedly seen on the videos, claiming to have seen things that were not there. These actions have led to a spike in threats of violent actions against abortion providers.
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