Word: lower-court
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Appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1948, Judge Ervin rarely missed a chance to write expansive opinions. After a complex appeal contesting an ambiguous will, he blasted the lower-court judge for having "murdered the king's, queen's and everybody else's English by using the monstrous linguistic abomination and/or." Pondering conflicting testimony in a manslaughter case, Ervin suggested that truth often comes to the biased witness as "the image of a rod to the beholder through the water-bent and distorted." North Carolina lawyers still quote Ervin's opinions because, says...
...civil rights lawyers implied that similar standards should be applied to Southern districts with plans like that of Mobile, Ala., the third district at issue before the court. In that city, blacks have appealed a lower-court ruling that Mobile's current steps toward integration are "reasonable"-even though blacks calculate that two-thirds of their elementary schoolchildren in metropolitan Mobile are still in all-black schools. The principles on which the lower court based its decision were defended by U.S. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, who appeared as a friend of the court to explain the Nixon Administration...
Immediately after the school arguments, the court will listen to attorneys challenge the constitutionality of court procedures in capital-punishment cases. When raised last term, the questions were avoided by the Justices who were closely divided. Because Blackmun had written the lower-court decision, he could not vote. Now the issues arise in two new cases, and the junior Justice, who is known to have doubts about the imposition of the death penalty, may be in a position to curb it. The court's next issue is just as tricky: whether or not Congress had the authority to lower...
Most major cities in the South-and in the North, for that matter-have adamantly refused to adopt the massive school busing plans necessary to compensate for residential segregation. Few are likely to do so voluntarily. Nashville has won a lower-court reprieve from a busing program pending a Supreme Court decision on its constitutionality. Schools in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C., were denied a similar stay by Chief Justice Warren Burger. They will open this week, ten days late, under a plan requiring two-way busing-and under protest...
...facto segregation, racial separation existing without legal sanction. As applied to the schools, the question is whether the law requires positive action by school officials, such as busing, to achieve racial mixtures that neighborhood schools, because of housing patterns, prevent. Without comment, Burger last week refused to delay lower-court orders for substantial busing in five large Southern systems. The court is scheduled to hear full-scale argument on the issue in October...