High Court

HARRISBURG - TV cameras are coming to the state's highest court, as Pennsylvania joins the majority of states that allow some type of video or audio recording of arguments in front of their supreme courts. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said yesterday that it will allow the nonprofit Pennsylvania Cable Network to videotape oral arguments in front of it, beginning Sept. 13. PCN cameras will be welcome at oral arguments in the justices' Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia courtrooms.

A District of Columbia law making it a crime to display critical signs near a foreign embassy is an unconstitutional limitation on free speech, the Supreme Court concluded in a 5-3 decision yesterday. The justices, however, upheld another part of the same law by unanimous vote. That part bars three or more protesters from gathering within 500 feet of an embassy or consulate, threatening the peace and refusing to obey a police order to disperse. "What the court has done," said Arthur B. Spitzer of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office, "is to subject demonstrators at embassies to the same rules as anywhere else.

He's been a biker, a Philly police officer, a lawyer, the Eagles Court judge, a Marine, an Air Force colonel, and an appellate judge. And now, Seamus P. McCaffery wants more than anything to be a justice on Pennsylvania's highest court. With just seven days until next Tuesday's election, McCaffery, a Democrat from Northeast Philadelphia, hopes voters will see him as a candidate who has worked his way up through life and the law - and will add a populist touch to the oldest appellate court in the nation.

Layoffs of white workers to preserve racial balance in the work place are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision yesterday in a "reverse discrimination" case. At the same time, however, the court endorsed racial hiring goals in public employment as a potentially valid, much less drastic remedy for past discrimination. Civil rights organizations hailed the decision as a triumph for affirmative-action programs and a defeat for the Reagan administration, which opposes broad racial preferences for minorities.

The Supreme Court yesterday ruled 5-3 to give public school officials broad powers to censor student newspapers, plays and other school-sponsored activities. Justice Byron R. White, writing for the majority, said that school officials, acting in their "capacity as publisher of a school newspaper or producer of a school play" had the authority to bar "speech that is, for example, ungrammatical, poorly written, inadequately researched, biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences.

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to decide whether criminal defendants can dismiss potential jurors simply on the basis of race. The court said it would hear a case in which three white defendants were accused of beating a black couple in Albany, Ga. The state sought to bar the defense from using its "peremptory challenges" to keep blacks off the jury, but the Georgia Supreme Court said criminal defendants have the right to discriminate in...

The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 yesterday that private homosexual acts between consenting adults are not protected by the constitutional right of privacy. The court majority upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia anti-sodomy law that makes it a crime for anyone, whether heterosexual or homosexual, to participate in oral or anal intercourse. The court decision, however, focused only on homosexual acts. Twenty-three other states and the District of Columbia still classify consensual sodomy as a crime.

TRENTON - There's a new face on the New Jersey Supreme Court - and another vacancy. Lawyer Anne Patterson of Mendham Township, Morris County, was sworn in on Thursday, more than a year after Gov. Christie nominated her to become a justice. She replaces Roberto Rivera-Soto, who left the court Wednesday. The change was part of a deal Christie brokered with Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who blocked her nomination out of frustration with Christie. In May 2010, Patterson was to have taken the place of Justice John Wallace of Gloucester County, the court's only African American, after Christie took the unusual step of declining to renominate a sitting justice for tenure.

Three men chasing a seat on the state's embattled and maligned Supreme Court are gearing up to bang heads and make a raucous race out of what is normally one of the duller statewide contests. Well, OK, maybe not raucous. But while judicial elections usually are snoozers, this one could actually ring some bells. Former Philadelphia District Attorney Ron Castille, Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Russell Nigro and West Chester gadfly lawyer Robert Surrick are after a spot on the seven-member high court.

The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to reconsider a ruling widely criticized as one of the most shameful and unjust in its history - that the U.S. government's mass confinement of Japanese-Americans in prison camps during World War II was constitutional. The justices will decide whether the government may be forced to compensate 120,000 U.S. citizens and permanent residents of Japanese descent for property losses suffered by those who were uprooted from their homes on the West Coast and imprisoned for 2 1/2 years.