You may want to start online with Professor Howard’s 2005 essay in EJournal USA, “ To say What the Law is: The Supreme Court as Arbiter of Constitutionality”:
http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0405/ijde/howard.htm
Most of the issues cases mentioned in Dr. Howard’s essay are discussed more fully elsewhere in this issue. We have an entire essay on Roosevelt’s “court packing” scheme and Richard Bernstein’s essay on the Marshall and Taney courts provides valuable details on issues in the Court’s early decades. Our “interactive” feature will lead you to a wide range of sources for the 1963 decision in Gideon that established an indigent defendant’s right to counsel and to the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education.
Cases mentioned in passing by Dr. Howard and not covered elsewhere in this issue received solid entries in Wikipedia. These include:
The Warren Court decisions on voting inequities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote
Lochner v. N.Y., the 1905 decision involving a New York baker:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York
The 1977 dispute between Washington and North Carolina apple growers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_v._Washington_State_Apple_Advertising_Comm.
New York Times Co. v Sullivan, the court’s 1964 decision on libel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_york_times_co._v._sullivan
The concept of “the right to privacy” in Roe V. Wade and other landmark cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._wade
You may also want to read:
Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
You’ll find the PBS Supreme Court “A Day in the Life” classroom segment especially effective in showing how daily life in American has been affected by the Court’s decisions:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/educators/adayinthelife.html
Last, but certainly not least, the SCHS “We the Students”
section presents cases relating directly to the lives of American schoolchildren
with “Case Texts” and suggested classroom exercises:
http://www.supremecourthistory.org/05_learning/subs/05_a03.html
