constitution, supreme court holdings, Roe vs Wade, abortion, Brown vs Schoolboard of Topeka, integration, Miranda vs Arizona, criminal rights.
Students of Constitutional Law are expected to be familiar with definitive Supreme Court Holdings and the areas of the law to which they apply. In Law school, Dr. Randall Furlong was an editor for the Georgetown Law Review and in order to help students keep them in memory, invented summaries of some of these landmark holdings expressed as Haiku, the classic Japanese 17 syllable poem (In a 5-7-5 arrangement). At a time when constitutional principles, especially in regard to the separation of church and state or our individual rights to privacy and to freedom from coercion, seem to have been challenged by executive and legislative practices, it is, perhaps, timely to remind ourselves of the history of some of these legal precedents. This second series involves Three cases of current interest.