Can the supreme court enforce its rulings on the executive branch? I've just read this article on Slate. In it, they describe how Trump's administration has ignored deadlines imposed by the U.S. District Court after losing a case to SCOTUS (I bolded the most relevant specific example). The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it will continue to defy a federal court order compelling the full restoration of DACA, the Obama-era program that allows 700,000 immigrants to live and work in the United States legally. By doing so, the administration has chosen to flout a decision by the Supreme Court, effectively rejecting the judiciary’s authority to say what the law is. Donald Trump first attempted to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in September 2017, a move that would’ve stripped its beneficiaries of work permits and subjected them to deportation. But his administration continually cut corners, failing to explain the basis for its decision and refusing to consider the impact of DACA repeal on immigrants, their communities, and their employers (including the U.S. Army). This June, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious” under federal law and therefore “set aside” DACA repeal. To implement that decision, U.S. District Judge Paul Grimm compelled the administration to restore DACA to its pre-repeal condition on July 17. Grimm’s order required the Department of Homeland Security to let DACA beneficiaries renew their status for two years, accept new applicants, and restore “advance parole,” which permits travel outside the country. But DHS did not do that. Instead, the agency maintained that it would reject new DACA applicants. It also declined to accept DACA renewals or reinstate advance parole. Does SCOTUS and the judicial branch have any way to actually enforce laws on the executive branch? It's one thing to enforce laws on some random citizen, but it seems there is no way for SCOTUS to enforce laws against the branch of government that's responsible for enforcing laws.
The US courts (including the US Supreme Court) do not have an army or even a police force under their direct control, except for a few court bailiffs. Ultimately, if the executive simply defies the courts, the only remedy is a political one. A court can order a person held unlawfully to be released from detention, but the jail/prison authorizes might ignore such an order. A court might order DACA applications to be accepted, and if they are not, might rule that deportations or other negative actions are unlawful. A court might hold persons who defy its orders in contempt, and send marshals to jail such persons. But if the executive branch in an organized way defies such orders, there is no judicial power to compel obedience to court orders. This is why the judiciary has famously been called the &quot;least dangerous branch&quot; of the government: it cannot actually do anything without at least the tacit cooperation of the executive. Cherokee Case (Worcester v. Georgia) There was a reference in the comments above to the the Cherokee Indians case, Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832). In that case the US Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Marshall held that the Georgia laws purporting to seize Cherokee lands were invalid as violations of Federal treaties. President Jackson was strongly displeased by this ruling. He was supposed to have said: John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. It appears that President Jackson probably did not say that, at least not publicly. But in fact Jackson did not take any steps to enforce the decision, and the decision was in fact not enforced. The lands were seized, and the Cherokee were forcibly relocated across the infamous trail of tears. This event shows that a court ruling (proper or improper) may have no effect if the executive branch refuses to obey or enforce it.
No enforceable contract can contain illegal clauses and work Contracts can not remove some rights and never can bypass obligations. Talking to the police at times is a requirement by law, as is taking to the labor board. Responding to a subpoena is legally forced by the court. An NDA might limit the amount what you can say, and a contract might limit who you can sue, but can not ban you from suing at all. In germany, a contract that tries to curtail such requirements would be Sittenwidrig and make all clauses that try to limit the rights fully Void and nill ab initio - in fact, it can be used as evidence against the drafting party that they tried to do so. So to stay legal and keep the clause working in the limited fashion where it is not demanded, the clause cuts the contract to explicitly exclude such situations.
There is a relevant Q&amp;A here about how ex post facto is defined in the United States. Not all law is about crime, and that includes NY rent control laws; violating them does not lead directly to a criminal prosecution, hence a sufficiently strict definition of ex post facto cannot apply to them. And such a sufficiently strict definition has been the explicit one since 1798, when the Supreme Court ruled in Calder vs. Bull ("law that makes an action done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal [...] law that aggravates a crime, makes it greater than it was [...] law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime", etc.). Notice that Article 1 Section 9 prohibits Congress (i.e., the Federal Government) from doing exactly the same thing, so if ex post facto refers to any kind of law, then there could not be any retroactive laws passed in the United States, period. However, the Supreme Court has apparently already set further, more recent, precedents, making it clear that this rule does not apply to tax law. I would assume in this case the intention is to retroactively extend the old law, i.e., if the old law expired on the 15th and the extension passes on the 20th, that extension will be retroactive to the 15th. If the extension then continues until a new law is in place, there will be no time period under which one or the other did not apply. Despite the wording in the news article, I do not think the intention is to make the new law retroactive, only the extension of the old one, for the simple reason that the legislature would never agree to pass such a brand new law later and no matter what it contains say it will be retroactive back to the original expiration date of a law it replaces even after they already extended that until there was a new law. That is borderline non-sensical. The Daily News blurb certainly makes it sound like it might be that way, but I think this is a bit of intentional obfuscation -- the way in which a partial quote is used in the first paragraph is indicative, and the Daily News is, well, the Daily News.
Any court from a municipal traffic court on up can declare a law unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court is almost never the court that does so in the first instance. Also, while the jurisdiction stripping law that you suggest might be unconstitutional, it is not obviously unconstitutional. The relevant language is in Article III, Section 2 of the United States Constitution (this has been modified by the 11th Amendment in ways that are not pertinent to the issue at hand): The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;-- to Controversies between two or more States;--between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States;--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects. In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. The key language being the language in bold, who scope and limitations are the subject of hot debate in legal scholarship. For example, both military tribunal law for non-soldiers and the collateral review of death sentences implicate this provision. An issue related to U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction over military court-martial court composition will be heard this year in oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court. There is also debate over whether the jurisdiction of every single federal court can be removed from a matter within the judicial power of the United States. In that regard, keep in mind that the United States federal court system did not have direct appeals of criminal convictions at all until the 1890s, although you could challenge, for example, the jurisdiction of a criminal court over your case with a writ of habeas corpus which is a collateral attack on a conviction in a separate civil lawsuit formally directed at your prison warden. That being said, as far as I know, a law is considered in effect until declared unconstitutional. It is illegal to break an unconstitutional law, until declared so. You are wrong. A law that is unconstitutional on its face is, in terms of legal theory, unconstitutional immediately upon enactment and a court simply acknowledges that fact. It is not illegal to break an unconstitutional law even if no court has yet declared it to be unconstitutional (in U.S. jurisprudence). A law that is unconstitutional as applied is unconstitutional in application at the moment it is applied unconstitutionally, and again, a court merely acknowledges that fact.
Yes. This is legal, even though it is highly unlikely. There were very few, if any, instances of the federal pardon power being used this way historically, but it could happen, and President Trump, while he was in office, intimated that he might use the pardon power in this fashion. Realistically, it would be easier for the President to prevent someone from being prosecuted in the first place if the crime took place during his term, but he might pardon someone who committed the crime under a previous administration. The fact pattern in the question: “don’t be surprised if I pardon anyone that puts to death repeat heroin and fentanyl dealers dealing in amounts larger than 50 pounds” doesn't sound very morally palatable. But consider a slight variant of it which is much more plausible. Suppose that while running for office a Presidential candidate says: don't be surprised if I pardon someone who was convicted of homicide in a previous administration for killing someone who had been using them as a sex slave in a human trafficking network, or killing someone who was in the process of raping them shortly before their divorce became final but was not allowed to assert a self-defense argument at trial because marital rape was legal at the time. Now arguably that's different, because it doesn't induce someone to commit a future crime. But the President has broad discretion to make policy to de-emphasize certain kinds of criminal prosecutions in any case while in office even without the pardon power, and generally, this is not a basis for having a special prosecutor appointed at the federal level since there is no individualized conflict of interest. Of course, the U.S. President can only pardon someone from a federal crime and can't pardon state crimes or criminal convictions from other countries. So, even if the President pardoned someone of a federal crime in this situation, the state in which the murders took place could prosecute the individual for murder unimpeded (constitutional double jeopardy considerations would also not bar a state prosecution following the federal prosecution). Indeed, the vast majority of murder prosecutions are made under state law, and there are very few murders that take place which are beyond the jurisdiction of any U.S. state and any foreign country, that are in the jurisdiction of the U.S. government and covered by a federal homicide statute, in any year. As noted by @hszmv in a comment to another answer: Federal Murder charges are a thing and can be prosecuted, but are normally reserved for murders that either involve federal government employees (especially if they are murdered because of the duties the performed in the course of their duty or the status as a federal employee) OR murders that occur on Federally Owned Property OR the Murder involved crossing state lines OR is in U.S. Jurisdiction but not in a territory or state jurisdiction (usually applies to some uninhabited territorial islands or U.S./International Waters). Further, a pardon would not prohibit the victim's family for suing the murderer for wrongful death, and indeed, probably wouldn't prohibit them from using the murder conviction that was pardoned to conclusively establish liability in a civil case under the doctrine of collateral estoppel (I haven't researched that highly specific and technical civil procedure issue, however, but even if that wasn't possible, the murder trial transcript would be admissible in the civil case). A civil judgement for wrongful death was famously obtained against O.J. Simpson by the victim's family after O.J. Simpson was acquitted in a criminal murder trial. This tactic would really only be helpful to a prospective defendant with respect to cases where there is not a parallel criminal offense under state law.
The core principle of stare decisis is that the law should not depend on what judge you got; two cases with the same facts should have the same outcome. In the common-law tradition, there weren't really written statutes; there was only "what's been done in the past," and so the only reference you'd have to what the law should be in some situation is past court decisions. If judges didn't have some constraints to rule similarly to before, there really wouldn't be any legal standards (because there was no written law to go back to; in civil-law countries, there always has been a written law, so precedent isn't so important). Stare decisis doesn't actually directly stop a judge from entering a decision that goes against binding precedent. However, judges are expected to obey precedent, and for the most part do what they're supposed to do. If they don't, the case will likely be reversed on appeal. Binding precedent only applies within the area a court serves; a court doesn't have to listen to precedent from a different court that has nothing to do with the case. The rule is that precedent from any court up the appeals chain is binding; federal district courts are bound by their circuit court and SCOTUS, state courts are bound by higher state courts and SCOTUS (but not other federal courts, as the case can't be appealed to them). A court can sometimes overrule its own precedent, but the cases where it can do that are rare (and so applying a higher court's precedent can also be viewed as "if you appeal to them they'll say X, so we're saying X.")
This came in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison (1803). At the last moments of his term, President Adams and Congress appointed a bunch of new judges to the courts. One of those was Marbury, but his new commission was not delivered by the outgoing Secretary of State John Marshall. The incoming President Jefferson had the undelivered commissions thrown out and ignored by his own Secretary of State (Madison). So Marbury sued to have his commission instated. There were some peculiar subtleties to the case. One is that Marbury sued directly in the Supreme Court, rather than an inferior court. A law passed by Congress had granted SCOTUS authority to be the trier of certain cases; said law was repealed before the case went before the court. Another oddity is that the Chief Justice was the very same John Marshall that had originally failed to deliver the commission; he did not recuse himself. The case was very contentious. Congress and the President were both very combative and eager to claim control of &quot;constitutionality&quot; for themselves. Congress would not much appreciate its laws being thrown out, and Jefferson was of the (combative) mind that it was in fact the President who decided the constitutionality of laws (the constitution can be said to explicitly charge him with enforcement of the laws and protection of the constitution), etc. The court risked getting neutered by both sides with just the slightest misstep. The President was sure to ignore any attempt to make him do anything, and Congress would retaliate if anyone but them threw out their laws. And simply declaring themselves impotent was the same set of problems. That the ruling effectively avoided all such problems makes it one of the great examples in SCOTUS opinions to this day, though not all hold it up in a positive way (it arguably intentionally handled the case backwards, so as to yield a ruling rather than a dismissal; some even argue the case may have been manufactured as a way to formally let SCOTUS claim this power). The ruling basically said the following: (1) Does Marbury have a right to this commission? Yes, the commission was validly created and the deliverance of it is just a non-discretionary formality, failure of which is an injury that can be fixed (give him the commission). (2) Do we have the power to force the Executive branch to do something like this? Yes, for non-discretionary duties that are non-political and owed to a particular person, the courts may order the lower ranks of the Executive branch to do things. (3) Do we even have the authority to hear this case? No. It is held that the law in question would grant us original jurisdiction over this issue, but that is unconstitutional: our original jurisdiction is completely enumerated by the Constitution, and cannot be expanded by legislation. (4) So what do we do? Nothing, we just dismiss it. Madison can be ordered to do this thing, but won't actually be so ordered since the law required to let us do so is invalid. And we can invalidate that law, but don't actually do so since Congress has already repealed it. In this way both Congress and the President were left with no real angles to hold a beef over the court, as neither one of them had effectively had their authority directly neutered or compelled. The ruling did nothing but what was already done, and simply asserted the Judiciary had certain powers it could flex later: it could rule on the constitutionality of laws, and it could order the Executive branch to do things. For what it's worth, the Marshall court never really invoked these powers again, seemingly still mindful of a contentious battle for power between the branches of government that could render the courts impotent, but one way or another the ruling successfully claimed the power to decide the constitutionality of things for the courts.
In the comic timeline (seen in Uncanny X-Men #141, Jan 1981), as mainly narrated by Kitty Pryde, In 1984, &quot;a rabidly anti-mutant candidate was elected President&quot;, and &quot;within a year&quot; had arranged to pass &quot;the first Mutant Control Act&quot;. This is struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. Then (let's say this is 1985-1986ish), &quot;the Administration responded by activating the Sentinels&quot;, who promptly proceed to take over the country. Whoops! There is a further Mutant Control Act in 1988, which makes mutants &quot;pariahs and outcasts&quot; to be hunted down and for the most part killed. Presumably this is under the Sentinel-controlled version of the U.S. government. By 2013, society is split between baseline humans (H), &quot;anomalous&quot; carriers of the mutant gene (A), and full-blown mutants (M). The A-class people are forbidden from reproducing. All this is said to derive from, and be in accordance with, the law of 1988. While we don't know what the 1985 law did, it's presumably not too different from the 1988 version. The newer one is only constitutional insofar as the Sentinels have taken over. Their orders, made in response to the Supreme Court's action, were to &quot;eliminate the mutant menace once and for all&quot;, and deposing the government is their chosen path to that end. Although the robot coup was not what the President was hoping for, we can still interpret that the intent behind using the Sentinels was to (1) achieve similar effects to the rejected law of 1985, and (2) do so in a way that the Supreme Court could not block. The idea is that the use of the Sentinels probably is just as unconstitutional as the original law, but is something the government could get away with. In the movie, Trask says that Congress refused to fund the program, and so he is appealing to the executive branch for clandestine financing: this is a similar dynamic of trying to evade the lawful process. It is plausible that the grounds for striking down the 1985 law would include equal protection, as well as protection against search and seizure, and requirements of due process. It would have been a broad enough ruling that the administration felt justified in taking an entirely different approach, rather than attempting to tweak the law. For example, if the Supreme Court held that mutants were not a protected class, and not even human anyway, but that the proposed law infringed the rights of humans in some minor way, then the creation of the Sentinels seems less obvious as a response. They must have concluded something broad enough to cover anti-mutant laws in general. I'd estimate that whether or not mutation was deemed within scope of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the other obvious civil rights violations are more likely to be biting. Certainly in the case of the giant murderbots, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are clearly engaged, and the Supreme Court might be more comfortable applying them straightforwardly, compared to reading a novel class into the Fourteenth. Politically - and the use of Nixon in the film makes this apt - the problem was not to stay within the bounds of the law, but to evade its power. Secretly funding a private-sector program doesn't make the outcome any more or less constitutional, but it does make it harder for plaintiffs to challenge. They have to find out about it. They have to demonstrate standing, which is difficult - see for example U.S. v Richardson 418 U.S. 166 (1974) holding that a taxpayer did not have standing to challenge Congressional funding of the CIA. And if the Sentinels haven't been turned on yet, then nobody has been actually harmed; all we have is a robot that might hurt mutants. Once they are activated, the secret is out, but at that point if all goes &quot;well&quot; then there are no mutants left to object. In the event, a legal challenge was impossible for different reasons (robot tyranny).