West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (decided June 14, 1943): explicitly overrules Minersville v. Gobitis, 1940, and holds that refusal to salute flag and recite pledge as part of regular school day was protected by First and Fourteenth Amendments (Court holds that this was impermissible “compelled speech”; plaintiffs were Jehovah’s Witnesses; school had softened earlier versions of the pledge which other parents had said sounded “too much like Hitler’s”)
Taylor v. Mississippi, 319 U.S. 583 (decided June 14, 1943): companion case to Barnette, holding that speech urging that the flag not be saluted is protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments
Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1 (decided June 14, 2004): atheist father did not have standing to challenge school requiring daughter to say “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance as violating First Amendment (mother, who had legal custody, intervened to oppose and even a lot of liberals criticized the father for putting his daughter into the center of a publicized Constitutional as well as family dispute)
National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (decided June 14, 1977): Here the Court criticizes the Illinois Supreme Court’s use of its “shadow docket” to in effect dispose of the merits. Suit was to enjoin American Nazis from marching in a community filled with Holocaust survivors. The state court lifted a lower court’s stay, i.e., the march would happen before a direct appeal could be heard. The Supreme Court holds that the removal of the stay acted as an appealable final judgment, treats the motion to reinstate the stay as a direct appeal, grants the motion, and sends the case back to state court to decide whether the Nazis’ First Amendment rights had been curtailed without procedural safeguards. (The state court then held that they had been, and allowed the march to go forward, 373 N.E.2d 21, which it did on June 25, 1978, and it was a dud, outnumbered by protesters.) (This incident resulted in a very nuanced TV movie, with a cast of old Jewish actors familiar to my parents’ generation playing survivors, headed by Danny Kaye in his only dramatic role.)
Greer v. United States, 593 U.S. 503 (decided June 14, 2021): jury instruction that conviction for possession of firearm while a convicted felon required a showing that the defendant knew he had felony convictions not necessary in this case; with a multiple felony record defendant could be presumed to have known it
Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, 585 U.S. 1 (decided June 14, 2018): ban on entering a polling place while wearing a political message violated First Amendment (here, a “Don’t Tread on Me” shirt)
Animal Science Products v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co., 585 U.S. 33 (decided June 14, 2018): federal court doesn’t have to follow foreign government’s construction of its own law as submitted in its official brief, though must give it weight (class action alleging price-fixing under Sherman Act against Chinese sellers of Vitamin C; Chinese government asserted that pricing regime was mandated by Chinese law) (verdict had been for plaintiff; on remand the Second Circuit dismissed anyway on international comity grounds, 8 F.4th 136)
Pennsylvania State Police v. Suders, 542 U.S. 129 (decided June 14, 2004): where plaintiff alleges “constructive discharge” (sexual harassment so intolerable she had to resign) defendant has burden to show that she failed to mitigate harm (e.g., by filing complaints, which it looks like this woman did, though to little effect)
Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217 (decided June 14, 1971): no Equal Protection violation when city after being ordered to desegregate public swimming pools instead closed them (I used to live in a Southern town which did that, but it had only one pool and it was whites only; this city had a pool for blacks which got closed along with the whites-only pools) (wrinkle in this case is that city was the lessee on one of the white pools and the owner subsequently reopened it as whites-only); 5 - 4 decision
McDonald v. Pless, 238 U.S. 264 (decided June 14, 1915): denied motion to set aside verdict by applying the common law rule that a juror cannot testify as to misconduct in the jury room (here, an impermissible quotient verdict) (that’s not the rule in New York, at least not now, though one can’t formally question a juror post-verdict without a good reason)
West v. Gibson, 527 U.S. 212 (decided June 14, 1999): 1991 amendment to Title VII is read to allow the EEOC to award “appropriate” (language from original 1972 Act) compensatory damages instead of just back pay (“Words in statutes can enlarge or contract their scope as other changes, in law or in the world, require their application to new instances or make old applications anachronistic [citations]”)
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