What did the Supreme Court hold in Brown v. Board of Education?	Historic 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared separate public schools for African- American and white students to be inherently unequal.
What was the Burger Court?	U. S. Supreme Court under the leader-ship of Chief Justice Warren Burger, 1969 - 1986.
What is a concurring opinion?	Opinion by a member of an appellate court that agrees with the result reached by the court but disagrees with or departs from the court's rationale for the decision.
What was the Court-packing plan?	Famous attempt by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937 to secure congressional approval of legislation permitting the president to nominate a new Supreme Court justice for every sitting justice on the Court who, upon reaching seventy years of age, did not retire. Congress rejected Roosevelt

What did the Supreme Court hold in Engel v. Vitale?	U. S. Supreme Court decision (1962) stating that public school officials may not require pupils to recite a state-composed prayer at the beginning of each school day.
What is the incorporation of rights?	Theory that the Bill of Rights has been incorporated or absorbed into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby making it applicable to the states.
What is judicial activism?	Variously defined. A philosophy pro-posing that judges cannot decide cases merely by applying the literal words of the Constitution or by discerning the intention of the framers, but must and should openly recognize that judicial decision making is choosing among conflicting values. Judges should so interpret the Constitution as to keep it reflecting the current values of the American people.
What is mechanical jurisprudence?	Belief that judges only discover the law and do not make it.

What is obscenity?	Work that, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient interest in sex by depicting sexual conduct as specifically defined by legislation or judicial interpretation in a patently offensive way and that lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
What is an opinion of the Court?	Decision of the U. S. Supreme Court that has strong precedential value because a majority of the justices agree on the result and the reasons for that result.
Oral argument?	Part of the appellate court decision-making process in which lawyers for both parties plead their case in person before the court.
What is original intent?	Doctrine that judges should interpret the Constitution in accordance with the intent of the framers.

What is a plurality opinion?	On the U. S. Supreme Court, any written opinion that reflects the views of less than a majority of the justices who heard the case, but more than any other view.
What is ratio decidendi?	Those statements in a judicial opinion that are essential to the resolution of the case and are binding precedent.
What was the Rehnquist Court?	U. S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 1986 - 2005.
What was the Roberts Court?	U. S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, 2005 - present.

What did the Supreme Court hold in Roe v. Wade?	U. S. Supreme Court decision (1973) holding that the right to privacy, grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment's due process guarantee of personal liberty, encompasses and protects a woman's decision whether to bear a child.
What was the Warren Court?	U. S. Supreme Court under the leader-ship of Chief Justice Earl Warren, 1953 - 1969.
Webster v. Reproductive Services?	U. S. Supreme Court decision (1989) that, for the first time, upheld significant government restrictions on abortion.