Latest news with #Court
Express Tribune
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Pak IWT stance vindicated by arbitration court
Listen to article The Court of Arbitration constituted in accordance with the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960, ruled on Friday that India's decision of holding the treaty in abeyance did not deprive it of its competence to adjudicate Pakistan's complaints against its neighbour. The court issued the "Supplemental Award" on the proceedings instituted by Pakistan against India. "Consistent with this interpretation of the Treaty, the Court has previously found that once a proceeding before a court of arbitration is properly initiated, as in the present case, "there must be a strong presumption against the incidental loss of jurisdiction over the matters placed before it by subsequent acts, such as the appointment of a neutral expert. "Accordingly, the text of the Treaty, read in light of its object and purpose, does not to allow either party, acting unilaterally, to hold in abeyance or suspend an ongoing dispute settlement process," the order read. The Supplemental Award said that "the text ... does not provide for the unilateral "abeyance" or "suspension" of the Treaty. Rather, the Treaty provides for its continuation in force until terminated by mutual consent by India and Pakistan". "Such text definitively indicates an intent by the drafters not to allow for unilateral action to alter the rights, obligations, and procedures established by the Treaty, including the treaty's dispute settlement procedures. "Additionally, the object and purpose of the Treaty, as expressed in its Preamble, includes establishing procedures for the resolution "of all such questions as may hereafter arise in regard to the interpretation or application of the provisions agreed upon in the Treaty." The order added, "To that end, the Treaty's procedures, inter alia, call for the establishment of a court of arbitration at the request of one of the parties, and provide that such court of arbitration, after receiving written and oral submissions, is empowered to render an award or awards that "shall be final and binding upon the Parties with respect to that dispute." "It is difficult to see how this object and purpose of the Treaty — compulsory dispute resolution for definitive resolution of disputes arising between the Parties — could possibly be achieved if it were open to either Party, acting unilaterally, to suspend an ongoing dispute settlement process. Such an interpretation would fundamentally undermine "the value and efficacy of the Treaty's compulsory third-party dispute settlement process". The award, made public on the website of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, was welcomed by Pakistan, saying that it affirmed the court or the neutral expert's competence despite India's unilateral action. Through a request for arbitration on August 19, 2016, Pakistan initiated the arbitration proceedings against India, seeking to resolve certain issues concerning the design or operation of run-of-river hydro-electric plants on the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab rivers and their tributaries. The plants included the Kishenganga Hydro-Electric Plant and the Ratle Hydro-Electric Plant. After the filing of Pakistan's request for arbitration, India requested for the appointment of a neutral expert to resolve certain design and operation questions concerning the two projects. On October 13, 2022, the World Bank, which had brokered the IWT 65 years ago, appointed Michel Lino as a neutral expert pursuant to Article IX and Annexure F to the Treaty. In April 2025, after the Pahalgam attack, India said it was holding the IWT in abeyance as a punitive measure against Pakistan. "The Court of Arbitration unanimously finds: A) India's position that it is holding the Treaty in "abeyance", however, that position may be characterized as a matter of international law, does not deprive the Court of Arbitration of competence," the ruling said. "B) finds that the Court of Arbitration has a continuing responsibility to advance its proceedings in a timely, efficient, and fair manner without regard to India's position on "abeyance", and that a failure to do so would be inconsistent with its obligations under the Treaty," it added. "C. DETERMINES that the above findings apply, mutatis mutandis, with respect to any competence that the Neutral Expert otherwise possesses. D. RESERVES for further consideration and directions all issues not decided in this Award." The Court of Arbitration is led by Prof Sean D Murphy and included Prof Wouter Buytaert, Prof Jeffrey P Minear, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh and Dr Donald Blackmore. It said that according to IWT, technical questions could be placed before a neutral expert or an arbitral panel. Pakistan, meanwhile, welcomed the Supplemental Award, noting that the Court affirmed its competence in the light of recent developments and that India's unilateral action could not deprive either the Court or the neutral expert to adjudicate the issues before them. "Pakistan looks forward to receiving the Court's Award on the First Phase on the Merits in due course following the hearing that was held in Peace Palace in The Hague in July 2024," said an official handout issued after the ruling was published on the court's website. "The high priority, at this point, is that India and Pakistan find a way back to a meaningful dialogue, including on the application of the Indus Waters Treaty," it said. It referred Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's remarks this week that Pakistan was "ready to engage in a meaningful dialogue with India".
New York Post
9 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Justice Jackson's activist opinion does more damage to Supreme Court civility
For most citizens, the release of Supreme Court opinions is about as exciting as watching paint dry, particularly in a case dealing with the limits of district courts in issuing universal injunctions. Yet Friday's Trump v. CASA case included a virtual slugfest between Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The decision was one of the biggest of the term. The Court moved to free the Administration from an onslaught of orders from district judges seeking to block the President in areas ranging from the downsizing of government to immigration. Advertisement However, it was the departure of the normally staid court analysis that attracted the most attention. The tenor of Jackson's language shocked not just many court watchers, but her colleagues. It seemed ripped from the signs carried just a couple of weeks earlier in the 'No Kings' protests. The Court often deals with issues that deeply divide the nation. Yet it tends to calm the waters by engaging in measured, reasoned analysis — showing the nation that these are matters upon which people can have good-faith disagreements. But that culture of civility and mutual respect has been under attack in recent years. Advertisement Not long ago, the Court was rocked by the leaking of the draft of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The was followed by furious protests against conservative justices at their homes and an attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There was also a change in the tenor of the exchanges in oral argument and opinions between the justices. Recently, during the argument over the use of national injunctions in May, Chief Justice John Roberts was clearly fed up with Justice Sotomayor interrupting government counsel with pointed questions and commentary, finally asking Sotomayor, 'Will you please let us hear his answer?' This hyperbole seemed to border on hysteria in the Jackson dissent. The most junior justice effectively accused her colleagues of being toadies for tyranny. Advertisement It proved too much for the majority, which pushed back on the overwrought rhetoric. While the language may seem understated in comparison to what we regularly hear in Congress, it was the equivalent of a virtual cage match for the Court. Some of us have argued that our system is working just as designed, particularly as these issues work through the courts. The courts have ruled for and against this Administration as they struggle with the difficult lines of authority between the branches. Liberals who claim 'democracy is dying' seem to view democracy as getting what you want when you want it. Advertisement It was, therefore, distressing to see Jackson picking up on the 'No Kings' theme, warning about drifting toward 'a rule-of-kings governing system' She said that limiting the power of individual judges to freeze the entire federal government was 'enabling our collective demise. At the very least, I lament that the majority is so caught up in minutiae of the Government's self-serving, finger-pointing arguments that it misses the plot.' The 'minutiae' dismissed by Jackson happen to be the statutory and constitutional authority of federal courts. It is the minutiae that distinguish the rule of law from mere judicial impulse. Justice Barrett clearly had had enough with the self-aggrandizing rhetoric. She delivered a haymaker in writing that 'JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: '[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.' Ibid. That goes for judges too.' She added, 'We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.' In other words, the danger to democracy is found in judges acting like kings. Barrett explained to her three liberal colleagues that 'when a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.' The last term has laid bare some of the chilling jurisprudence of Justice Jackson. Untethered by statutory or constitutional text, it allows the courts to float free from the limits of Article III. Advertisement For many, that is not an escape into minutiae but madness without clear lines for judicial power. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the best-selling author of 'The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.'
Buzz Feed
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
SCOTUS Backs Parents In Religious LGBTQ+ Book Case
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday that a group of religious parents can opt their children out of elementary school curriculum that involves books with LGBTQ+ themes. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, a group of parents of a number of religions, including Catholics and Muslims, sued the Montgomery County, Maryland, public school board after the district removed a policy that allowed those with religious objections to pull their children out of class whenever a book with LGBTQ+ characters would be used for teaching. The parents argued the new policy violated their religious freedom to teach their own values to their children. In an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court ruled that the parents were entitled to a preliminary injunction against the policy. 'The parents are likely to succeed on their claim that the Board's policies unconstitutionally burden their religious exercise,' the majority wrote. 'The Court has long recognized the rights of parents to direct 'the religious upbringing' of their children.' The court also said the lower court's finding that the parents' arguments were 'threadbare' was incorrect. In a fiery dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that for poorer school districts, it may be too costly to engage in lawsuits over opt-outs or spend funds tracking student absences. 'Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections,' she wrote. 'The Court's ruling, in effect, thus hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards.' 'In a time of ever-increasing polarization in our country, exemptions that would require schools to allow children to refuse exposure to materials and curriculum about people from various backgrounds is divisive and harmful,' Deborah Jeon, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland said in April before the court heard oral arguments. The conservative justices didn't see it that way. 'They're not asking you to change what's taught in the classroom,' Justice Brett Kavanaugh said during arguments. 'They're only seeking to be able to walk out … so the parents don't have their children exposed to these things that are contrary to their own beliefs.' The decision is likely to have reverberations throughout the country. The Supreme Court has, in recent years, sided with plaintiffs who allege that antidiscrimination statutes are violations of their religious freedom, including a high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field and a website designer who didn't want to be forced to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. GOP-led states have been fighting to bring Christianity into public school classrooms by introducing bills to require displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms and pushing Bible-based curricula for students as well. It's also another victory for right-wing culture warriors who, for the past several years, have been leading the movement to remove books from classrooms and reshape what and how schoolchildren are learning. Under the guise of parental rights, Republicans and conservative activists have pushed laws that ban books that deal with LGBTQ+ themes and censor what teachers can say about sexual orientation and gender identity. HuffPost.
Winnipeg Free Press
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
In their own words: What justices, Trump and groups say about courts and birthright citizenship
At the Supreme Court Friday, justices lambasted one another over the extent of judicial authority. Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused President Donald Trump of trying to game the courts to break the law. The president expressed joy in reclaiming some power back from the judiciary, while advocates sounded worries for immigrant families before filing new legal challenges. The high court ruled that federal judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions, but the decision left unclear whether Trump's restrictions on birthright citizenship could soon take effect in parts of the country. Here are some of the arguments and comments made by justices, Trump and advocates regarding the court's 6-3 ruling over an effort by the president to deny birthright citizenship to children born to immigrants. Barrett, Jackson on the judiciary's role Justice Amy Coney Barrett defended the majority opinion that the judiciary does not have 'unbridled authority' to enforce the president's duty to follow the law. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who joined Sotomayor's dissent, wrote that the role of lower courts should ensure that. 'For that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law — full stop,' Jackson wrote. Barrett called Jackson's arguments 'extreme' and said her reasoning was not tethered 'to any doctrine whatsoever.' 'She offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush,' Barrett wrote. She later stated: 'We will not dwell on Justice Jackson's argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries' worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.' Sotomayor accuses Trump of 'gamesmanship' Sotomayor did not mince words when arguing the ruling presents a threat. She accused the Trump administration of using tactics to game the courts and said it has been defying the Constitution. 'The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the government makes no attempt to hide it,' she wrote. 'Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.' Sotomayor also wrote that Trump's order is 'patently unconstitutional under settled law,' and argued that granting relief through Friday's decision 'is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.' 'The rule of law is not a given in this Nation, nor any other. It is a precept of our democracy that will endure only if those brave enough in every branch fight for its survival. Today, the Court abdicates its vital role in that effort,' she wrote. A warning about what may be next Sotomayor expressed worries about the chaos that may follow before the Supreme Court gets to decide on whether these children should get U.S. citizenship. She worried about the decision leaving some children 'stateless,' risking deportation even when their parents are in the country legally with temporary status visas or other programs. Sotomayor also warned about the possible wider impact of the ruling. 'No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship,' she wrote. Trump celebrates Trump, meanwhile, quickly celebrated the ruling, calling it a 'monumental victory for the Constitution,' the separation of powers and the rule of law. 'These judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation,' Trump told reporters during a news conference in the White House briefing room. 'Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.' The president said he would try to advance restrictions on birthright citizenship and other policies that had been blocked by lower courts. Immigrant rights group responds One of the groups that challenged Trump's order quickly went back to court seeking to keep his new restrictions on birthright citizenship at bay. CASA, a nonprofit immigrant rights organization, asked a federal court in Maryland to certify a class-action lawsuit that would represent all newborns who would no longer automatically be citizens if Trump's order goes into effect. 'Scotus has carelessly put at risk the citizenship of many hundreds of thousands of newborns and yet to be born innocent. But in the end, this ruling does nothing more than guarantee that the fight and the movement towards justice continue,' said George Escobar, CASA's chief of programs and services.
Vox
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Vox
The hilarious implications of the Supreme Court's new porn decision
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upheld a Texas anti-pornography law on Friday that is nearly identical to a federal law it struck down more than two decades ago. Rather than overruling the previous case — Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004) — Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion spends at least a dozen pages making an unconvincing argument that Friday's decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is consistent with the Court's previous decisions. Those pages are a garbled mess, and Thomas spends much of them starting from the assumption that his conclusions are true. All three Democratic justices dissented. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. That said, Free Speech Coalition makes two very significant changes to the Court's approach to free speech protections for pornography, and these changes are clearly stated in Thomas's opinion. In Ashcroft, the Court struck down a federal law that basically required pornographic websites to screen users to determine if they are over the age of 18. One reason for this decision is that it was far from clear that websites were actually capable of performing this task. As the Court had acknowledged in an earlier case, 'existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.' This mattered because, long before the internet was widely available, the Court had established, in cases involving phone sex lines and televised pornography, that 'the objective of shielding children' from sexual material is not enough 'to support a blanket ban if the protection can be accomplished by a less restrictive alternative.' These decisions established that adults have a First Amendment right to view sexual material, and this right cannot be diminished in an effort to keep that material from children. Related The huge stakes in a new Supreme Court case about pornography Accordingly, in Ashcroft, the Court ruled that the federal age-gating law must survive the toughest test that courts can apply in constitutional cases, known as 'strict scrutiny.' Very few laws survive this test, and the law at issue in Ashcroft did not. The Court's ruling in Free Speech Coalition, however, changes the rules governing laws that seek to block minors' access to pornography, but which also may prevent adults from seeing that material. While much of Thomas's opinion is difficult to parse, one significant factor driving the Court's decision is the fact that technology has evolved. The internet, and internet pornography, is much more widely available than it was two decades ago. And it may now actually be possible to reliably age-gate pornographic websites. Now, laws like the one at issue in Free Speech Coalition are only subject to a test known as 'intermediate scrutiny' — a test which, as the name implies, is less strict. Under this somewhat less rigid framework, an anti-pornography law will be upheld 'if it advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests.' According to Thomas, in Free Speech Coalition, the 'important governmental interest' at issue in this case is 'shielding children from sexual content.' Intermediate scrutiny, it should be noted, is not a paper tiger. Laws that discriminate on the basis of gender, for example, are typically subject to intermediate scrutiny. And most of these laws are struck down. But the new rule announced in Free Speech Coalition gives states broader leeway to restrict access to pornography. Additionally, Thomas's opinion also implies that adults have no legal right to keep their decision to view sexual material private. The plaintiffs in Free Speech Coalition argued that 'the unique stigma surrounding pornography will make age verification too chilling for adults.' Pornography users are likely to be reluctant to submit their ID to a site like Pornhub, for example, out of fear that the website will be hacked. This is likely to be especially true for people who are trying to keep their sexual orientation a secret, or people who could face serious career consequences if their private sexual behavior became public. But Thomas's opinion is exceedingly dismissive of the idea that privacy matters in this context. 'The use of pornography has always been the subject of social stigma,' he writes. But 'this social reality has never been a reason to exempt the pornography industry from otherwise valid regulation.' It's unclear just how far Thomas, or the rest of his colleagues, would take this conclusion. Could a state, for example, require everyone who wants to look at a pornographic video to submit their names to a government agency that will publish them on a public website? At the very least, however, Free Speech Coalition suggests that lawyers challenging anti-pornography laws may no longer raise privacy arguments as part of their challenge. The Court's decision is likely to make life miserable for judges Free Speech Coalition makes clear that the era when the courts struck down nearly all laws regulating sexual speech is over. The government will now play a larger role in regulating online content depicting sex. There is a very good reason, moreover, why pre-Free Speech Coalition courts took a libertarian approach to sexual speech. Although the First Amendment has been part of the Constitution since the late 1700s, it was largely meaningless for most of American history. And the government routinely prosecuted people for saying things, or for producing art, that regulators or law enforcement found objectionable. Under the 1873 Comstock Act and similar state laws, for example, people were routinely jailed for selling erotic literature or nude art, even works that are now widely considered masterpieces. This regime began to change in the middle of the twentieth century, when the Court started protecting speech of all kinds, including both sexual and political speech. In Roth v. United States (1957), for example, the Court established that sexual speech and art could only be banned if the 'average person, applying contemporary community standards' would determine that 'the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.' Later Supreme Court decisions tweaked this rule, and they also focused on whether the challenged speech or art has 'serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.' Speech that does have such value is protected. All of these legal tests, however, are quite vague. And the question of whether a particular film or photo has serious artistic value is rather obviously in the eye of the beholder. Hence Justice Potter Stewart's infamous statement that he may not be able to come up with a coherent legal framework to determine what sort of material should be banned, 'but I know it when I see it.' The result was that, for much of the 1970s, the justices literally had to meet in the basement of the Supreme Court to watch pornographic movies that were the subject of prosecutions, in order to make subjective calls about which movies should be protected by the First Amendment. Those movie days, as described by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong in The Brethren, were thoroughly humiliating experiences. Justice John Marshall Harlan, for example, was nearly blind during many of these screenings, so one of his law clerks had to describe what was happening on the screen to him — often prompting Harlan to explain 'By Jove!' or 'extraordinary!' Meanwhile, filmmakers would often try to work within the Court's 'serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value' framework by including political discussions or similar matters in a movie that was otherwise about sex. According to Woodward and Armstrong, for example, one such film ended with a speech 'on the comparative merits of Communist and Western societies.' The point is that, once the Court decided that some sexual speech is protected by the Constitution, it was extremely difficult to come up with a principled way to distinguish art that is too sexy to be protected by the First Amendment from art that is not. And the Court's attempts to do so only made a mockery of the justices. Eventually, the combination of Supreme Court decisions that read the First Amendment broadly, and technologies like the internet that made it very difficult to suppress sexual speech, ushered in an era where pornography is widely available and mostly unregulated. In upholding the Texas law at issue in Free Speech Coalition, the Court could end this era. But the justices are likely to make their own lives miserable as a result. Texas's law incorporates many of the Supreme Court's past pornography decisions, only restricting speech, for example, that 'lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.' Thus, if Texas wants to apply this law to Pornhub, some poor judge will have to watch much of the content on that website to determine if it has literary, artistic, political, or scientific value — and whatever that judge decides, their decision will be appealed to other judges who will have to engage in the same exercise. Justice Thomas and his colleagues, in other words, should probably install a popcorn machine in the Supreme Court building, because they've just signed themselves up to recreate the humiliating movie days of the Court's past.
