States brief ~ PA Supreme Court upholds slot-machine law

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States brief ~ PA Supreme Court upholds slot-machine law

June 22, 2005 05:12:00 pm

[JURIST] Leading Wednesday's states brief, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has upheld the state's slot-machine gambling law [text]. While rejecting some parts of the law, the court found that the process used by the legislature to enact the law was constitutional. Attorneys argued over constitutional provisions that say a bill cannot be amended to change its original purpose and the requirement that legislation address a single subject. In the opinion [PDF text], Chief Justice Ralph Cappy wrote, "we conclude, that as a matter of law, there was a single unifying subject to which most of the provisions of the act are germane, the regulation of gambling." The court threw out the section of the Gaming Act which gave the state Gaming Control Board the power to override local zoning ordinances when determining where to locate the casinos. View Governor Ed Rendell's Chief of Staff John Estey's statement here. AP has more.

In other states news …

A New Jersey appeals Wednesday dismissed the lawsuit of a Seton Hall student who claimed that the University's refusal to recognize a gay and lesbian group violated the state's law against discrimination [NJ AG summary]. The court found that the law's exemption for religiously affiliated institutions applies to Seton Hall and that the school did not waive the exemption with its anti-discrimination policy [university website]. Seton Hall University is operated by the Archdiocese of Newark and receives state and federal funding. Read the opinion here [PDF text]. AP has more.
The New Mexico Court of Appeals [official website] heard arguments Wednesday over the constitutionality of Santa Fe's living wage ordinance [PDF text]. Some local businesses are claiming that the city went beyond its constitutional authority by enacting the ordinance. The ordinance was enacted in February 2003 and went into effect almost one year ago after a state court ruled in favor of the city. AP has more.
The Supreme Court of Missouri has upheld the constitutionality of the state's use tax law [PDF text] which allows local governments to tax mail-order purchases at the same rate as the local sales tax. Kirkwood Glass Co. Inc., argued that the law violated the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution because consumers could pay more use tax in one Missouri city than the sales tax in another city. In its opinion [text], the Supreme Court rejected that argument by saying that a jurisdiction's use tax can only be compared to that same jurisdiction's sales tax and the use tax is fine if it is equal to or lesser than the sales tax. In 1994 the US Supreme Court stuck down the state's use tax law by finding it unconstitutional under the interstate commerce clause because in some parts of the state the tax was higher than the sales tax. The legislature responded by passing a new use tax law. AP has more.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.