That Case Tastes a Little First Amendmenty to Me

I know there are millions of people in the world who do not care about this, but the last two weeks of June are huge in the legal world. These are the last two weeks of the Supreme Court of the United States' October 2006 term. Many of us wait with baited breath to see what SCOTUS has in store for us this year.

According to NPR, the Court has many "First Amendmenty" issues on the slate. Seriously. I was listening to NPR at lunchtime today and a legal commentator was talking about the big decisions to be issued in the next few weeks. The commentator, from Slate Magazine, described three cases and said, "Many of the cases have a First Amendmenty flavor to them this term." I am pretty sure amendmenty is not a word and certainly not a word SCOTUS would use to describe their cases. Until today, I would have guessed not even a legal commentator would have used a word like "amendmenty." It sounds more like something Paris Hilton would have said, as in, "Don't I have some sort of Amendmenty rights to get out of jail?"

In other momentous SCOTUS news, today is the 40-year anniversary of Thurgood Marshall's appointment to the Supreme Court. While it is definitely a day of celebration, it is bittersweet for those of us who lament the direction the Court has taken in recent years. While I used to wait for the last weeks of June with a mixture of nerves and excitement, with each passing year, I get a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. The current Court has slowly eroded all of the fundamental rights American citizens enjoy and seems to be set to only continue in that direction.

Right now, that amendmenty flavor leaves a sour taste in my mouth.