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...decision in the Lawrence v. Texas case overturned convictions against two Houston men, whom police had arrested after busting into their home and finding them engaged in sex. And for the first time in their lives, thousands of gay men and women who lived in states where sodomy had been illegal were free to be gay without being criminals. Gay rights groups held spontaneous celebrations in dozens of U.S. cities...
...cases citing Lawrence have been decided in favor of gay-rights plaintiffs. Florida's ban on adoption by gay couples, for instance, has stood. But the impact of Lawrence v. Texas will likely only grow, say the lawyers involved in the arguments five years ago. "What Lawrence really means is that it is no longer enough to simply disapprove of conduct for the majority to make it a crime," says Paul Smith, the attorney who had argued before the court urging it to strike down the sodomy statutes...
...Supreme Court ended its 2007-2008 term by handing down a flurry of big decisions the last few days, most notably granting a constitutional protection for individuals to own guns (District of Columbia v. Heller) and banning the death penalty as punishment for the rape of a child (Kennedy v. Louisiana). These two particular cases resulted in closely contested 5-4 decisions, with justices falling lockstep into the predictable conservative and liberal factions and Justice Anthony Kennedy playing his expected role as the swing vote. But ideological blocs such as these have been a much rarer occurrence this season, belying...
...split (Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Alito versus John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer) with the conservatives winning 13 and the liberals getting six. Says Lazarus, "The only really big case the liberals won 5-4 last term was the global warming case, Massachusetts v. EPA." This term, by contrast, was much more unpredictable and harder to define...
Still, in the ideologically charged cases that ended the term, Justice Kennedy's influence seemed to persist. Says Lee Epstein, constitutional law professor at Northwestern School of Law: "If you look at the cases he was always there." First, Kennedy penned the opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, which many believe was the most significant decision legally this term because the court declared the unconstitutionality of President Bush and Congress' scheme for handling Guantanamo Bay prisoners during a time of heightened national security concerns. ("It was a reasonably big slam," says Epstein.) Kennedy also authored the child rape case banning...