The announcement of the year's
most-searched news stories on Yahoo might fool you into thinking that the sensationalized murder cases of NFL star Aaron Hernandez, or boyfriend slayer Jody Arias, were the dominant legal events of the year. Hardly.
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 ActThe 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 farAnd 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 fightA 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.