Supreme Court Lecture
Lecture Overview
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Talk about the way the Supreme Court
works
Talk about debating Courts AFF’s
Debating Courts on the NEG
Courts Specific Arguments on the
Topic
What is the Supreme
Court?
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Supreme Court is the highest court in
the land
The court has ultimate authority over
the law in the United States
Nine justices, appointed for life
How does a case get to
the Supreme Court?
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Starts out at a lower level
Gets appealed to the Supreme Court
Cases can come from State Supreme
Courts or federal district courts
The Supreme Court grants a writ of
certiorai to a case
It requires four Supreme Court justices
to decide whether a case will be heard
What does the Court do?
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They meet throughout the year
They hear about 80-100 cases a year
They hear oral arguments on a case
They release their decisions usually in
May or June
The decision is then binding
Courts and Debate
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Why read a courts AFF?
Because
Because
doctrine
Because
Because
it helps versus politics
it allows you to claim advantages from
it allows you to claim modeling advantages
you’ll know more than they do
Politics
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Do courts link to politics?
Obama doesn’t push the plan, but the
court does have spillover effects
Court also gives political branches a
scapegoat “shielding”
Doctrinal Advantages
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The court decides cases based on
precedent
Precedents spill-over to other areas of
the law
By changing a precedent, you can
change other areas of the law
Arguably, Congress & executive order
counterplan can’t solve
Modeling advantages
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Other nations “model” the Supreme
Court
The Supreme Court has unique
symbolic effect for other nations
The US Supreme Court also gets cited
by other nations
This gives you access to international
advantages even on a domestic topic
Angle vs. the Lower
Courts
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The Supreme Court also has
advantages vs. lower court
counterplans
Unique symbolism
Access to doctrine of the federal
constitution
Debate is fundamentally different than
a normal states cp debate
Knowledge Advantage
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Many people don’t know much about
the courts
They may be a politics or economics
expert, but don’t know much about
the courts
Tip: The Gibberish Advantage
Courts NEG Arguments
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Legitimacy DA
The Supreme Court has no ability to enforce
its decisions
Relies 100% on its legitimacy
Controversial decisions sap the courts
legitimacy
One impact is presidential powers—that the
court needs to stand up to the president
Court Capital DA
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A variant of legitimacy
Some theorize that the court has a certain
amount of “institutional capital” that it can
use
The court doesn’t want to look bad, so they
will only make a certain number of
controversial decisions
Run specific upcoming court cases as DA’s
Hollow Hope
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Named after Gerald Rosenberg’s
book—the Hollow Hope theory is that
the Courts are bad for social change
The argument is that the courts are
“flypaper” for social movements—big
symbolic cases suck them in
The movement gets hurt because the
court is bad for social change
Court Stripping
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When Congress limits the ability of the
court to hear certain cases
If Congress gets angry with the
Courts, stripping occurs
Undermines the courts ability to
function and causes problems
internationally
Reverse Politics
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Works with the Congress Counterplan
The Congress Counterplan “triggers the
politics disad”
You run a politics disad where triggering the
impact is good (i.e. Obama bad)
You then argue that the permutation and
the plan alone “shield the link” preventing
the good impact from happening
Example of Reverse
Politics
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A) TPP will pass now
B) Congress Counterplan tanks the TPA
C) TPP is bad
If the AFF argues that the courts case or the
permutation triggers the link, the neg
argues that the court shields the link
Court Specific K--CLS
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Critical Legal Studies says the law is
inherently biased
It doesn’t matter what the law is,
judges will manipulate the law to
bolster the rich
It is bad to uphold the law and make it
look good—you shouldn’t mask the
law
Surveillance law and the
Courts
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Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a]
against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported
by Oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.
The Katz decision
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1967 decision Katz v. United States
The government conducted a warrantless
wiretap and listened to a telephone that the
defendant, Charles Katz, was using to
conduct gambling activities
Justice Stewart made it clear that the Fourth
Amendment "protects people, not places.
Creates a reasonable expectation of privacy
The modern day interp of
Katz
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Katz has not been well updated to the
internet era
Third Party Doctrine:
Fourth Amendment does not prohibit
obtaining information revealed to a
third party
Doesn’t matter if the assumption was
the person would not tell
Third Party Doctrine in
Modern Era
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Google, Facebook, email are considered third
parties
Ninth Circuit has held that to/from addresses of
emails and IP addresses of websites are “third
parties”
You use a browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox,
etc. considered to be a “third party”
The right to privacy
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Right to privacy was first decided in
Griswold v. Connecticut
Comes from 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th
amendment
Extended in Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v.
Texas
Other modern day
surveillance
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Kyllo v. United States, n31 the Court's
2001 decision finding that the use of a
thermal imaging device on a home is a
search within the meaning of the
Fourth Amendment.
Adaptation to modern day technology
Klayman v. Obama
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This is the meta-data case that is on
appeal
Ruled that bulk collection of American
telephone metadata likely violates the
Constitution. Case has been argued
before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
Klayman
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Klayman recently filed a supplemental
brief stressing the importance of the
appeal continuing despite USA
Freedom given the NSA’s “pattern of
illegal and unconstitutional acts for an
extended period of time.”
(https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/how-usa-freedom-impacts-ongoing-nsa-litigation)
AFF Case
Re-balance Katz test to eliminate the
third party requirement for the internet
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Would make it part of your reasonable
expectation of privacy that what you
type into google can’t be searched by
the government without a warrant
AFF Plan ideas
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Justice Sotomayor’s solo concurrence in United States v.
Jones:
Called into question “the premise that an individual has
no reasonable expectation of privacy in information
voluntarily disclosed to third parties.”
This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which
people reveal a great deal of information about
themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out
mundane tasks. People disclose…the URLs that they visit
and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to
their Internet service providers
(https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43586.pdf)
Advantages
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A1. Fourth Amendment
Could claim deontology: that rights
are absolute
Excellent evidence that the 4th
amendment is key to democracy
Good evidence that US Supreme Court
decisions are modeled, and that
democracy is modeled
Democracy solves war
Advantages
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A2. Open internet
Several dissent oriented web-sites
have shut down in the wake of the
Snowden revelations
We need a free and open internet to
solve a host of problems
Economy, disease, general exist.
problems
Advantages
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A3. Presidential Powers Bad
Good evidence that the Court has
given too much ground to the
President in surveillance
Presidential powers risk war and
executive overreach
Court is a key check
Other Advantages
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A4. Human rights credibility: propping
up fourth amendment important to hr
credibility
A5. Judicial independence: good to
create a strong model of judicial
independence
Drones AFF
Good cards that say the court should re-calibrate
the right to privacy to put limits on drone
surveillance
A1. War on terror—court checks on executive help
WoT b/c exec will be more careful
A2. Right to privacy—claim rights or democracy off of
it
A3. Drone proliferation—our drone policy is modeled
and causes other nations to use drones
A4. Racial profiling—drones are used against
minorities
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Possible to run other
AFF’s
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Strike down meta-data with the courts
Human Rights Credibility
Judicial independence
Net Freedom
Tech Leadership
NEG Capital DA
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Spokeo v. Robins
Robins sued Spokeo, which is a website that has
information about people on it
Spokeo, Inc. operates a “people search engine”—it
aggregates publicly available information from
phone books, social networks, and other sources
into a database that is searchable via the Internet,
and displays the results of searches in an easy-toread format
Spokeo continued
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Thomas Robins claimed that Spokeo had inaccurate
info that he was employed, according to Robins,
this prevented him from getting a job
No proof of injury to Robins
Class action lawsuit that Robins claims millions of
similarly situated customers, so the case is worth
billions
The Disad
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A) Court will rule for Spokeo now
B) Capital trades-off with Spokeo
C) Spokeo key to the tech sector
D) Tech sector key to military
heg/economy
Answer to opening trivia
question
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Chief Justice John Roberts
Antonin Scalia
Samuel Alito
Clarence Thomas
Anthony Kennedy
Sonia Sotomayor
Elena Kagan
Stephen Breyer
Ruth Bader Ginsburg