The Supreme Court's Current Term

(September 2001)

Ilana Greenstein, issue editor, writes:

This month's issue of Mass Dissent is dedicated to the Supreme Court's 2000-2001 term -- a term which can only be described as fractured. Of the Court's 79 decisions, fully one-third (26) were decided five to four -- the highest proportion of such votes since the current justices began serving together in the 1994-1995 term. Left out of that number are the issues which the Court declined to address: most notably, affirmative action.
Probably the most infamous of those cases is the truly bizarre Bush v. Gore. In our first article, Bonnie Tenneriello, of the National Voting Rights Institute, uses that case as a springboard to discuss the future of the voting rights movement.
In the second article, David Nathanson, an appellate attorney with the Committee for Public Counsel Services, describes the Court's application of the Fourth Amendment to heat-seeking sensors in Kyllo v. United States.
In the last two articles, Paromita Shah and Halim Moris, immigration attorneys at Greater Boston Legal Services, discuss two decisions, INS v. St. Cyr and Zadvydes v. Davis, each of which address an issue of monumental importance in the areas of immigration law. In Zadvydes, the Court ruled that the indefinite detention of non-citizens (the so-called "lifers") raised a serious constitutional problem and, as such, must be rejected.
In St. Cyr, the Court affirmed the right of legal immigrants to have their cases reviewed by a federal court before being deported, and held that a 1996 law which made deportation automatic for an expanded group of immigrants could not be applied retroactively.

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