Elena kagan family

Selected Opinions by Justice Kagan:

Topic:Free Speech

The First Amendment offers protection when an entity engaging in expressive activity, including compiling and curating others’ speech, is directed to accommodate messages it would prefer to exclude. Also, a state may not interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.

Topic:Criminal Trials & Prosecutions

When an expert in a criminal trial conveys an absent analyst's statements in support of their opinion, and the statements provide that support only if true, the statements come into evidence for their truth. If those statements are also testimonial, the Confrontation Clause will bar their admission.

Topic:Copyrights

A copyright owner possessing a timely claim for infringement is entitled to damages, no matter when the infringement occurred.

Topic:Labor & Employment

Although an employee must show some harm from a forced job transfer to prevail in a Title VII claim, they do not need to show that the injury satisfies a significance test.

Topic:Free Speech

Although true threats of violence are outside the bounds of First Amendment protection, the First Amendment still requires proof that the defendant had some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of their statements. However, the state only needs to prove recklessness, which means that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that their communications would be viewed as threatening violence.

Topic:Trademarks

When the accused infringer has used a trademark to designate the source of its own goods, that kind of use falls within the heartland of trademark law and does not receive special First Amendment protection.

Topic:Patents

The doctrine of assignor estoppel, which limits an inventor's ability to assign a patent to someone else for value and later contend in litigation that the patent is invalid, applies only when the assignor's claim of invalidity contradicts explicit or implicit representations that they made in assigning the patent.

Topic:Lawsuits & Legal Procedures

When a company serves a market for a product in a state, and that product causes an injury in the state to one of its residents, the state's courts may entertain the resulting lawsuit.

Topic:Voting & Elections

A state may enforce an elector's pledge to support their party's nominee (and the state voters' choice) for President.

Topic:Due Process

Due process does not require a state to adopt an insanity test that turns on a defendant's ability to recognize that their crime was morally wrong.

Topic:Government Agencies

A court should not afford Seminole Rock/Auer deference unless the regulation is genuinely ambiguous after exhausting all the traditional tools of construction. If genuine ambiguity remains, the agency's reading must still fall within the bounds of reasonable interpretation. A court also must make an independent inquiry into whether the character and context of the agency interpretation entitle it to controlling weight.

Topic:Trademarks

The Lanham Act's prohibition on registration of immoral or scandalous trademarks violates the First Amendment.

Topic:Death Penalty & Criminal Sentencing

The Eighth Amendment may permit executing a prisoner even if he cannot remember committing his crime. On the other hand, the Eighth Amendment may prohibit executing a prisoner even though he suffers from dementia or another disorder, rather than psychotic delusions.

Topic:Voting & Elections

A state may not use race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines unless it has a compelling reason.

Topic:Immigration & National Security

A state offense is an aggravated felony for immigration purposes when it has every element of a listed federal crime, except an element requiring a connection to interstate or foreign commerce.

Topic:Government Agencies

When two halves of a statute do not correspond to each other, this gives rise to an ambiguity that calls for Chevron deference.

Topic:Patents

Patent exhaustion does not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission.

Topic:Death Penalty & Criminal Sentencing

The Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders.