“new!”

popularly The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), limited the protections provided by the Fourteenth Amendment (which prohibits states from denying any person “the equal protection of the law”). Specifically the Supreme Court ruled that a state-sanctioned slaughtering monopoly did not abridge other slaughterhouse owners' privileges and immunities as U.S. citizens and deprive them of property rights, as they had claimed. The Court thereby refused to extend federal protection of civil rights to the property rights of businesspersons, but in so doing it unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks and other minorities.

268 U.S. 652 (1925), extended First Amendment freedom-of-speech and Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection provisions to the states as well as the federal government. Although Socialist Benjamin Gitlow's conviction in a New York court on criminal anarchy charges was upheld by the Supreme Court (“a state may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means”), the Court used the case to note that freedoms of speech and the press are among the fundamental rights and liberties constitutionally protected from impairment by the states. The ruling was the first of a number of decisions holding that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the provisions of the Bill of Rights to state action.

545 U.S. 469 (2005), held that a city's action in taking private property and selling it to a private developer with the aim of improving the city's bad economy does not violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The Supreme Court found that because the taking of private property to sell for private development served a public purpose, it satisfied the “public use” requirement of the Fifth Amendment. Kelo upheld prior decisions rejecting public ownership as the sole method available to promote development that benefits the larger community. The Court stated that the judicial branch must defer to legislatures in determining the public need that justifies a taking, and the course used to fulfill that need.

198 U.S. 45 (1905), struck down a New York law setting 10 hours' labor a day as the legal maximum. In a case in which a baker had contracted with his employees for longer than the 10-hour working day, Justice Rufus W. Peckham declared that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the states from curtailing a person's liberty to make his or her own economic arrangements with his or her employees. This decision drew a stinging rebuke from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whose opinion became the prevailing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the 1930s, when legislation such as maximum-hours laws were held to be constitutional.

291 U.S. 502 (1934), upheld the price-setting activities of a New York dairy control board and provided a legal foundation for government regulation of business “affected with a public interest.” The case thus set aside the narrower interpretation made famous by Justice James C. McReynolds in Munn v. Illinois.

376 U.S. 254 (1964), held that even false statements about public officials were entitled to protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments (freedom of speech; equal protection of the laws) unless “actual malice” could be demonstrated. Sullivan was a Montgomery, Alabama, police commissioner who was implicated (although not named directly) in an ad by a civil rights group published in the New York Times. The ad was highly critical of the Montgomery police department, causing Sullivan to sue for libel and defamation of character. The Court, however, held that any public official who sues for damages because of an alleged falsehood must prove that the falsehood had been issued with the knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not. The Court found no such malice on the part of the Times. Ten years later, in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974), the Court affirmed the right of private individuals as opposed to public persons to recover libel damages when only fault rather than “actual malice” is proven.

popularly The Pentagon Papers Case, 407 U.S. 713 (1971), removed an injunction against the New York Times designed to stop publication of classified government documents known as the Pentagon Papers. In what is regarded as one of the most significant prior restraint cases in history, the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision, held that the government had failed to demonstrate the “heavy burden of proof” needed to justify prior restraint of the press, thus freeing the newspaper to resume publishing the politically controversial material.

221 U.S. 1 (1911), dissolved 34 companies controlled by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust as constituting a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. While in one sense the case was the high point of the “trust-busting” efforts of two presidents (see also Northern Securities Co. v. United States), in another sense it marked a turn toward a more conservative interpretation of the Sherman Act. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White promulgated the idea that a restraint of trade by a monopolistic business must be “unreasonable” to be illegal under the Sherman Act. White's failure, however, to define a “reasonable” restraint, coupled with the imprecise brevity of the Sherman Act, made subsequent antitrust decisions exceedingly difficult to predict.

: major dispute

: a repeat inquiry by the same court into all or some of the issues in an action for the purpose of correcting a problem (as the improper admission of evidence) in the prior trial, determining the merits of a challenge (as that the verdict is contrary to law) to the prior outcome, or considering newly discovered evidence compare appeal

: something of value (as money, goods, services, credit, or release of previously transferred property) that is newly given