The Supreme Court ReviewI
During the last half century the United States Supreme Court has played a key role in defining a constitutional right to ______, affirming or establishing ______rights for all Americans, and upholding the ______of ______. Throughout this fifty year period the ______of the United States Supreme Court has changed dramatically. Until 1967 only ______had served on the Supreme Court. Then in that year President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed ______as the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Fourteen years later, President Ronald Reagan appointed ______as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. This trend toward diversity in the membership of the nation’s highest court has continued during the last two decades. In 1991 President George Herbert Walker Bush named ______the second African-American justice. Bush’s successor William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton added a second woman to the Supreme Court in 1993 by appointing ______. President Barack Obama has continued the modern trend toward diversity on the Supreme Court by his two appointments: ______and ______. Female justices constituted or made up one-third of the Supreme Court at the beginning of the 2010 fall term, andJustice Sotomayor was the first ______justice.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the nation’s highest court has consistently expanded ______rights. The ______movement of the mid-twentieth century, which brought the Brown school desegregation case to the court’s attention, provided a model that other groups have used to extend civil rights and equal justice in American society. For example, feminist groups turned to the federal courts to gain legal protection for ______opportunities for American women.
The federal courts have used the 1964 ______Act and the Fourteenth Amendment’s ______Clause to protect the rights of women in the American workplace. In 1971 the United States Supreme Court expanded the rights of American women by its decision in ______v. ______. Reed v. Reed involved an Idaho law that said “______must be preferred to ______” in appointing administrators of estates. The Supreme Court ruled that the Idaho law’s different treatment of men and women was ______, because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thereby, Reed v. Reed set precedent that the federal courts could use the Equal Protection Clause to protect the rights of American ______under certain circumstances.
Since the 1971 Reed decision the Supreme Court has continued to protect the individual rights enumerated or specifically granted in the Constitution. For example, in the 1989 case of ______v. ______the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas man who was arrested for burning an American flag as a political protest. In its decision the court declared that the ______Amendment right to free expression protects an American’s right to burn the American flag. When public opinion suggested popular opposition to this ruling, Congress responded by passing the ______Act of 1989. The 1990 case of ______v. ______ once again gave the Supreme Court the opportunity to rule on the flag burning issue. A majority of the justices reaffirmed the Johnson decision’s protection of an individual’s First Amendment right to free expression by declaring the Flag Protection Act ______on the grounds that it violated the ______Amendment.
In recent decades the United States Supreme Court identified a constitutional basis for an individual’s right to ______. The most famous right to privacy decision involved the case of ______v. ______. In this 1973 decision the Supreme Court declared that women have the right to obtain an ______during the first three months of pregnancy. A majority of the court ruled that state criminal abortion laws violated the ______Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the court in the Roe v. Wade decision, the Due Process Clause protects the right to ______against state action, and this right to privacy includes a ______’s right to end her own pregnancy.
During the last several decades, the Supreme Court has also invalidated or overturned legislative acts and executive actions that the justices have believed exceeded the authority granted to these government officials by the ______. For example, the Supreme Court invalidated a ______act of Congress in United States v. Eichman, when it declared the Flag Burning Act unconstitutional. In these recent decisions the Supreme Court has used the power of ______to protect such constitutional principles as separation of powers and the ______and ______system. One such case arose during the ______scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. During his administration, President Nixon secretly ______-______all conversations held in the Oval Office. When the ______committee investigating Watergate asked for these tapes, Nixon refused to release them. The president’s lawyers argued that ______gave him the right to keep his records private. However, in a unanimous decision in 1974 the Supreme Court ruled in ______v. ______that executive privilege did/did not (please circle one) apply in the Nixon case and the president must release the complete Watergate tapes. This ruling directly resulted the following month in______’s resignation from office in disgrace.
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