Legal News

Monday at the High Court: Religion, Law School, Drty Txts, and Costco!

By Ashby Jones

No word, not even a hint of a word, emerged outta D.C. this weekend on the Justice Stevens-replacement front. So here we sit, just tap, tap, tapping our fingers, waiting for word to break.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t action going on down at One First St., N.E., on Monday. Because there is. Lots of it. Let’s bring you up to speed.

For starters, the Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday in a case arising out of the University of California’s Hastings College of Law. At issue: whether the school could deny recognition to a Christian student group because it won’t let gays join. The case could ultimately help clarify whether college nondiscrimination policies trump the rights of private organizations to determine their own membership. Click here for the AP report; here for Scotusblog’s take; here for an LB post on the case from December, at the time the court agreed to take it up.

According to the AP writeup, the Court seemed pretty well split along predictable lines. Justice Antonin Scalia questioned whether it made sense for a school to tell a student group who it could (and couldn’t) include. “It is so weird to require the campus Republican Club to admit Democrats, not just to membership, but to officership,” said Scalia. “To require this Christian society to allow atheists not just to join, but to conduct Bible classes, right? That’s crazy.”

But other justices didn’t seem thrilled with the potential ramifications of an opposite ruling. “Are you suggesting that if a group wanted to exclude all black people, all women, all handicapped persons, whatever other form of discrimination a group wants to practice, that a school has to accept that group and recognize it, give it funds and otherwise lend it space?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

On Monday, the court also heard arguments on whether employees’ text messages sent on an employer-owned device should be, in fact, considered private.

The case examines whether a California police department violated the constitutional rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages sent and received by a pager owned by the city of Ontario, Calif.

The Ninth Circuit ruled in 2008 that the police officer, Sgt. Jeff Quon, had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and found that the police chief’s decision to read the pager’s messages violated the officer’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Lastly, the justices agreed to hear The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide if retailer Costco can be held liable for copyright infringement for reselling luxury Swiss watches it obtained through third-party sources.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 19, 2010 (boomark / email).