A busy day in court

A couple of decisions from the Supreme Court today:

• The Supreme Court held Tuesday that police may set up roadblocks
  to collect tips about unsolved crimes.
  The court overturned a decision by the Illinois Supreme Court, which
  ruled that officers may solicit information from motorists only in an
  emergency. The case involved a man arrested for drunken driving at a
  Lombard, Ill., checkpoint set up to get information about an unrelated
  fatal hit-and-run accident.
  Three justices expressed concerns the ruling could open up motorists to
  police interference without yielding useful information about crimes.
  "There is a valid and important distinction" between seizing a person
  to determine whether he or she has committed a crime and seizing a
  person to ask whether that person "has any information about an unknown
  person who committed a crime a week earlier," wrote Justice John Paul
  Stevens, joined by Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  The case was a follow-up to a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that roadblocks
  intended for drug searches are an unreasonable invasion of privacy
  under the Constitution.
  
• The Supreme Court voted unanimously to restrict when consumers can sue
  over bad telephone service, a victory for regional phone companies.
  In the ruling released Tuesday, the justices held that consumers cannot
  use federal antitrust laws in suits claiming that regional phone
  companies provide substandard service to rivals, which hurts customers
  of those rivals.
  The Bush administration had sought that outcome, arguing that a ruling
  otherwise would open courts to multiple lawsuits accusing the regional
  phone companies of failing to assist their rivals and "could threaten
  substantial disruption of the telecommunications industry."
  

Posted by flow Frazao on January 13, 2004 at 12:21 PM | Permalink