President Thomas Jefferson signed an Act of Congress approving Ohio’s statehood in 1803, making it the 17th state. Congress had never passed a resolution formally admitting it as a state, however. While this has no real constitutional significance, this oversight was … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Ian’s legal fact of the week
William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States (1909-1913), remains the only president to also serve on the Supreme Court. He served as the tenth Chief Justice, from 1921-1930.
The only crime defined in the Constitution is ‘treason‘, which is found in Article III s. 3. A response to the misuse of this crime by the British Crown, it was limited to waging war against the U.S. or giving … Continue reading
It was originally proposed that the President be chosen by popular vote, but the delegates to the Constitutional Convention agreed (after 60 ballots!) on a system known as the Electoral College. The procedure for election of the President and Vice President … Continue reading
The Law Library of Congress is the world’s largest law library, with nearly 3 million books, including one of the world’s foremost rare law book collections and the most complete collection of foreign legal periodicals in the United States.
There have been six Justices of the Supreme Court who had previously served as Supreme Court clerks: Byron R. White, William H. Rehnquist, John Paul Stevens, Stephen G. Breyer, John G. Roberts, and Elena Kagan.
The provision in Article I of the Constitution specifying that each state shall have two senators elected by the state legislature was of such importance to the Philadelphia delegation that they insisted it not be subject to amendment, hence the … Continue reading
The practice of jury sequestration predates the Declaration of Independence, as its first recorded use in the U.S. was in the 1770 Boston Massacre trial in which the jury was sequestered for a week. The longest recorded sequestration was eight and … Continue reading
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, an estimated 1,165,383 violent crimes occurred nationwide in 2014, a decrease of 0.2 percent from the 2013 estimate (2015 full results are not yet available). This was 6.9 percent less than in 2010, and 16.2 percent less … Continue reading
Distressingly, there is no official “Lawyer’s Day” in the U.S.–despite the fact that nearly half of the members of Congress are lawyers. In fact, a member of Congress in 2015 was 66x more likely to be a lawyer than the average … Continue reading
The Supreme Court is provided for in Article 3, Section 1 of the Constitution, but only the Chief Justice is specifically mentioned (in Article 1, Section 3). The number of other “Judges of the Supreme Court” (Article 2, Section 2) is … Continue reading
While it is commonly thought that the phrase “of the people, by the people, for the people” is a description of our government that is found in the Constitution, the language actually comes from Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. … Continue reading