Most Liberal U.S.Supreme Court Justices in History

Most Liberal U.S.Supreme Court Justices in History Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been a thorn in the side of American conservatives. Shes been pilloried in the right-wing press by a range of so-called political experts, including college drop-out and shock jock Lars Larson, who publicly declared that Justice Ginsburg is anti-American. Her stinging dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which recently granted corporations certain exceptions to the Affordable Care Act with regard to birth control coverage, has once again loosed the gates of extreme conservative rhetoric. One columnist in The Washington Times even crowned her liberal bully of the week  even though hers was the dissenting, not majority, opinion. These critics act as if a liberal judge on the Supreme Court is a brand new development, but its the work of previous liberal judges that protects their right to come pretty close to slandering Justice Ginsburg in their published work. The Most Liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justices Also unfortunate for her critics is the fact that its unlikely that Justice Ginsburg will go down in history as the most liberal justice. Just take a look at her competition. While they sometimes sided with their conservative colleagues (often in tragic ways, such as in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II), these justices are generally considered to be among the most liberal of all time: Louis Brandeis (term: 1916-1939) was the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court and brought a sociological view to his interpretation of law. He is justly famous for establishing the precedent that the right to privacy is, in his words, the right to be let alone (something right-wing extremists, libertarians, and anti-government activists seem to think they invented).William J. Brennan (1956-1990) helped expand civil rights and liberties for all Americans. He supported abortion rights, opposed the death penalty, and provided new protections for freedom of the press. For example, in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Brennan established the actual malice standard, in which news outlets were protected from charges of libel as long as what they wrote was not deliberately false.William O. Douglas (1939-1975) was the longest-serving justice on the Court, and was described by Time Magazine as the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court. He fought against any regulation of speech and famously faced impeachment after he issued a stay of execution for convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He is probably most well-known for arguing that citizens are guaranteed a right to privacy due to the penumbras (shadows) cast by the Bill of Rights in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which established the right of citizens to have access to birth control information and devices. John Marshall Harlan (1877-1911) was the first to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights. However, hes more famous for earning the nickname The Great Dissenter because he went against his colleagues in significant civil rights cases. In his dissent from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the decision that opened the door to legal segregation, he affirmed some basic liberal principles: In view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens...Our constitution is color-blind...In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.Thurgood Marshall (1967-1991) was the first African-American justice and is often cited as having the most liberal voting record of all. As an attorney for the NAACP, he famously won Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed school segregation. It should not be surprising, then, that when he became a Supreme Court justice he continued to argue on beha lf of individual rights, most notably as a strong opponent of the death penalty. Frank Murphy (1940-1949) fought against discrimination in many forms. He was the first justice to include the word racism in an opinion, in his vehement dissent in Korematsu v. United States (1944). In Falbo v. United States (1944), he wrote, The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.Earl Warren (1953-1969) is one of the most influential Chief Justices of all time. He forcefully pushed for the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision and presided over decisions that further expanded civil rights and liberties, including those that mandated publicly-funded representation for indigent defendants in Gideon v. Wainright (1963), and required police to inform criminal suspects of their rights, in Miranda v. Arizona (1966). Certainly other justices, including Hugo Black, Abe Fortas, Arthur J. Goldberg, and Wiley Blount Rutledge, Jr. made decisions that protected individual rights and created greater equality in the United States, but the judges listed above demonstrate that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is just the most recent participant in the strong liberal tradition of the Supreme Court and you cant accuse someone of radicalism if theyre part of a long-standing tradition.

Stream Order - The Classification of Streams and Rivers

Stream Order - The Classification of Streams and Rivers One of the most important aspects of physical geography is the study of the worlds natural environment and resources - one of which is water. Because this area is so important, geographers, geologists, and hydrologists alike use stream order to study and measure the size of the worlds waterways. A stream is classified as a body of water that flows across the Earths surface via a current and is contained within a narrow channel and banks. Based on stream order and local languages, the smallest of these waterways are also sometimes called brooks and/or creeks. Large waterways (at the highest level the stream order) are called rivers and exist as a combination of many tributary streams. Streams can also have local names such as bayou or burn. The Stream Order Geological Society of America Bulletin When using stream order to classify a stream, the sizes range from a first-order stream all the way to the largest, a 12th order stream. A first-order stream is the smallest of the worlds streams and consists of small tributaries. These are the streams that flow into and feed larger streams but do not normally have any water flowing into them. In addition, first and second order streams generally form on steep slopes and flow quickly until they slow down and meet the next order waterway. First through third order streams are also called headwater streams and constitute any waterways in the upper reaches of the watershed. It is estimated that over 80% of the world’s waterways are these first through third order or headwater streams. Going up in size and strength, streams that are classified as fourth through sixth order are medium streams while anything larger (up to 12th order) is considered a river. For example, to compare the relative size of these different streams, the Ohio River in the United States is an eighth order stream while the Mississippi River is a tenth order stream. The world’s largest river, the Amazon in South America, is considered a 12th order stream. Unlike the smaller order streams, these medium and large rivers are usually less steep and flow slower. They do however tend to have larger volumes of runoff and debris as it collects in them from the smaller waterways flowing into them. Going Up in Order If however, two streams of different order join neither increases in order. For example, if a second order stream joins a third order stream, the second order stream simply ends by flowing its contents into the third order stream, which then maintains its place in the hierarchy. The Importance of Stream Order Stream order also helps people like biogeographers and biologists in determining what types of life might be present in the waterway. This is the idea behind the River Continuum Concept, a model used to determine the number and types of organisms present in a stream of a given size. More different types of plants, for example, can live in sediment-filled, slower flowing rivers like the lower Mississippi than can live in a fast-flowing tributary of the same river. More recently, stream order has also been used in geographic information systems (GIS) in an effort to map river networks. The algorithm, developed in 2004, uses vectors (lines) to represent the various streams and connects them using nodes (the place on the map where the two vectors meet). By using the different options available in ArcGIS, users can then change the line width or color to show the different stream orders. The result is a topologically correct depiction of the stream network that has a wide variety of applications. Whether it is used by a GIS, a biogeographer, or a hydrologist, stream order is an effective way to classify the world’s waterways and is a crucial step in understanding and managing the many differences between streams of different sizes.