The fact is, 2013 featured a slew of crucial cases and legal developments that are poised to shape the legal and political landscapes for years to come. From gay marriage to government surveillance, here's a brief guide to the decisions and debates within the law that mattered most.
1. Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act
The biggest legal story of the year - the United States Supreme Court's decision in June to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act - might actually prove to be the biggest political story of 2014. In Shelby County v. Holder, the court declared on a 5-4 vote that jurisdictions with long histories of racial discrimination in voting laws (mostly in the South) no longer had to get pre-approval from federal officials before changing their voting rules. The law violated equal protection by treating various voting jurisdictions differently, the conservative justices ruled.
Perhaps recognizing the bipartisan support that exists for the law (Congress had renewed the particular provision that offended the court, Section 4, as recently as 2006), the justices invited lawmakers to go ahead and fix what they ruled to be broken in the statute. But there is little reason to think that such a remedy is on the way: No amendment to the Voting Rights Act, no new and improved preclearance provision, is pending on Capitol Hill. And this means the 2014 midterm elections will be influenced significantly by voter-suppression efforts now underway in jurisdictions that once were covered by Section 4. In fact, just hours after the court struck down Section 4 in Shelby County, for example, eager officials in Texas moved to restore dubious voter identification requirements that had been blocked by the federal courts under Section 4.
2. Government surveillance finally goes too far
And by far the biggest political story of the year - the disclosure of widespread domestic surveillance efforts leaked by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden - may prove to be the biggest legal story of 2014. This is especially true in the wake of a dramatic ruling last week in Washington by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, who declared that portions of the NSA's surveillance program "likely" violated the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The case, styled Klayman v. Obama, concerns the bulk gathering of phone call metadata and now heads to (the newly replenished) D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on its way, perhaps, to the Supreme Court itself.
And this is just a prologue: From the Snowden surveillance revelations will soon flow a series of cases that will challenge in federal courts virtually all aspects of what we know about the program.
3. New fronts open in same-sex marriage fight
A pair of much-watched Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage in June gave gay and lesbian couples across the country greater rights and benefits - the justices struck down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act, the provision that defined marriage as only between a man and a woman, and they blocked a California referendum to halt same-sex marriages. But these landmark rulings don't mark the end in the legal or political war over same-sex marriage - and no justice suggested they did.
Already, in fact, we are seeing courtroom clashes that raise some of the questions the Supreme Court stoically refused to answer in June. For example, can a same-sex couple that is lawfully married in a state (like California) that recognizes such marriages get divorced in a state (like Mississippi) that does not? That lawsuit is only beginning to wend its way through the courts and in the year ahead, we'll see hundreds of these sorts of legal conflicts played out in state and federal courts all over the country. Just this past week, a federal judge in Utah struck down that state's same-sex marriage ban while the Supreme Court of New Mexico, in a unanimous decision, declared that the state's constitution could not preclude such marriages. The stakes will be high: Same-sex marriage proponents want to press the advantages they gained in 2013, and expand same-sex marriage rights. Opponents of same-sex marriage, embattled after the June rulings, want to draw their own lines, and keep same-sex marriage from spreading more than it already has. The justices in Washington won't revisit this issue in 2014. But they may have to in 2015.
4. American prisons reach a breaking point
Not only are U.S. prisons terribly overcrowded - about one in every 35 adults is either in prison, on probation or parole. Not only do they impose exorbitant costs upon taxpayers - approximately $29,000 per year per inmate. Not only has mass incarceration been exposed as an unsustainable national policy for which the international community showers us with derision. But there's mounting realization that the prisons themselves are places of unspeakable abuse and mistreatment. "The conditions of confinement in this country have never been worse," Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative told Stephen Colbert earlier this month.
The opinion was shared by Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department's inspector general, who also this month issued a report that highlighted what he called a "growing federal prison crisis." But 2013 didn't just bring complaints from advocates - it also brought reform. In Colorado, for example, newly chastened prison officials finally backed away from their aggressive use of solitary confinement, especially for mentally ill prisoners. Other states are looking now to follow suit, and investigating anew their treatment of inmates, especially those inmates who one day will be released back into society.
5. The Senate finds a nuclear solution to chronically cleared benches
As Washington clenched and tensed over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-Nev.) use of the "nuclear option" to allow Democrats to approve long-blocked White House nominees for the federal bench, you know which constituency wasn't quoted much in news reports? Federal litigants - thousands upon thousands of patient people and dutiful corporations - who in dozens of jurisdictions all over the country have been forced to wait years to have their legal disputes resolved because of the scores of judicial vacancies on the federal benches. Part of the blame fell for the inability to replace retired judges fell to the Obama administration for its delays in nominating candidates. But most of the blame rests with Senate Republicans, who relentlessly filibustered President Obama's judicial nominations. How bad is the problem? According to government statistics, 37 jurisdictions across the country were under a form of "judicial emergency." With the Senate no longer allowing the filibuster to stall judicial appointments, expect a dramatic re-stocking of the nation's courts - and perhaps an unclogging of dockets far and wide.
6. Prosecutors create a murky mix of crime and terrorism in Boston
Tens of thousands of Americans were killed by guns in this country in 2013, but the "biggest" crime of the year undoubtedly was the Boston Marathon bombing of April. Acts of mass murder and terrorism predate even the founding of the country, but what's new and interesting about the now-pending federal case against Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the young man who could face the death penalty for his role in the attack, is how far government officials have gone to try to emphasize the "foreign terror" aspect of the crime to deprive the defendant of some of the constitutional rights a "regular" mass murder suspect would have. Today, for example, Tsarnaev's jailers have blocked his communications to the outside world through the use of what is euphemistically called "special administrative measures." As the case develops, the comparisons between Tsarnaev's trial (not yet scheduled) and the 1997 trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh may become more interesting. So too will be the ways we come to appreciate the legal difference between mass murderers and terrorists.
7. Meaningful sentencing reform gains momentum
Perhaps owing to the atrocious state of America's prisons in 2013, this year also witnessed a growing realization by members of both parties that something dramatic must be done to reduce mass incarceration. Pending now before Congress is a bipartisan piece of legislation titled the Justice Safety Valve Act, which would give federal judges more discretion to depart downward from mandatory minimum sentences. Congress is also considering the Smarter Sentencing Act, which would further reduce disparities in punishment for drug offenses. In August, Attorney General Eric Holder announced various ways federal officials would seek to shrink existing prison populations by releasing older and non-violent inmates. It was, indeed, a very good year for advocates of sentencing reform.
8. Debate over targeted killing enters the courts
Until the Snowden disclosures rocked the political world in Washington and beyond, the most contentious American national security policy was likely the Obama administration's continuing use of, and justifications for, drone strikes abroad. Those strikes continue - one earlier this month killed at least a dozen people attending a wedding in Yemen - even after President Barack Obama's speech in May in which he pledged stricter controls over (and a bit more transparency about) the "targeted kill" program. Since then, leaked intelligence has confirmed the use of "signature strikes" (in which unidentified people are targeted based on their patterns of behavior) as well as the CIA's disputed calculations of civilian casualties.
In federal court in Washington, a lawsuit brought this year by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights alleges that the government violated the constitution when it killed the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi and others in a drone strike in 2011. The case, styled Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, has been pending before U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, and will be big news - and will lead to a high-profile appeal - when it's decided.
9. Racism goes on trial in Zimmerman case
Some murder trials are important for what they reveal about the ways humans interact with one another. Other trials are significant because of the people involved in them. The case of George Zimmerman, who was charged with second-degree murder after he shot unarmed Trayvon Martin, led to the most significant trial of 2013 because of the worthy debate it generated about racism, law and justice. There may or may not be racial bias in the kind of "stand your ground" law that Zimmerman invoked as a defense to shooting Martin, but the trial that led to his acquittal helpfully prompted national discussion about the racial components of stop-and-frisk laws, capital punishment trends, along with drug arrests and sentencing. It is beyond dispute that the nation's criminal justice systems are racially biased - and the first step in fixing it is recognizing it.
10. Technology vexes the courts
Every year now, the nation's judges are confronted with a myriad of ways in which new technologies have pressed up against old laws. But 2013 forced the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, to address technology in particularly intense and interesting ways. In a monumental gene-patenting ruling in June, the Supreme Court said that human genes cannot generally be patented - a decision that will shape research for diseases like cancer for decades to come. And in another ruling, the court examined the ways in which police can collect DNA from criminal suspects, in addition to fingerprints and photographs, even though a whole lot more than mere identity can be gleaned from one's DNA. In a contentious 5-4 ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from the Court's narrowing of Fourth Amendment protection. "The proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties," he wrote, "would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection." To be sure, the spate of cases concerning government surveillance moving through the courts in the months will test the technological acumen of our judges even more.
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