Word: lopezes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Little chance, that is, until Lopez's court-appointed defense attorney decided that his client's case was hopeless enough to warrant a bold gamble. In a move that is about the closest an attorney ever gets to throwing a Hail Mary pass in the final two seconds of the Super Bowl, Jack Carter conceded that Lopez had indeed broken the law-and then went on to argue that the law itself was wrong. Thirty-seven months and two appeals later, the obscure public defender persuaded five Supreme Court Justices to overturn a law that several hundred legislators...
What's more, he did it with a constitutional argument that calls into question several decades of federal legislation. Because the majority ruling in U.S. v. Lopez represents a fundamental break with the way the court has interpreted the delicate balance between state and federal authority for the past 60 years, "it may be the most important case of the decade," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. "It redefines the nature of the Federal Government...
...last week's ruling, the court repudiated this interpretation for the first time in more than a half-century. Led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, five Justices agreed with Lopez's lawyer that the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 is unconstitutional, rejecting the government's argument that guns in schools contribute to violence, which in turn hampers students' learning and hurts the economy by making students less productive. The court was deeply divided, however. Justice Stephen Breyer, who called the majority ruling "extraordinary," took the unusual position of reading from the bench a portion of his dissent, which...
...Federal Government as a leap aboard the new conservative bandwagon of devolution. The move, however, has been brewing in the court for years, led by conservative Justices. Because the ruling's impact will depend on the court's inclinations, it may be too soon to say whether the Lopez ruling represents, in the words of Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, a "constitutional moment" -- an epochal period when the court realigns itself with a deep shift in prevailing political philosophy-or rather, as Ackerman's Yale colleague Michael Graetz quips, a "constitutional minute...
...weapons ban and the Republican push to put federal limits on state-court damage awards. In his weekly radio address last Saturday, Clinton said he had ordered Attorney General Janet Reno to report within a week on how to make the school gun ban constitutional. In the meantime, Alfonso Lopez is heading to a place where firearms are not a problem. He is joining the Marines. -Reported by Nina Burleigh and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Andrea Sachs/New York