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Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy today denied an emergency application filed by Proposition 8 sponsors asking the court to halt same-sex weddings until the justices issue a final disposition on their dismissal of a case asking them to to overturn a lower-court decision striking down the California marriage law.

That decision paved the way for same-sex marriages, which had been legal in the state before the passage of Prop 8, to resume. A federal court gave the go-ahead Friday evening, and gay couples immediately began tying the knot.

Supporters of Proposition 8, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, had said they believed that the 9th Circuit Court acted prematurely in allowing marriages to resume before the Supreme Court had issued its final judgment, which usually comes within 25 days of a ruling.

They filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court Saturday, asking the court to stop the 9th Circuit’s “premature move” allowing same sex marriages to go forward.

READ MORE: Proposition 8: Supreme Court Ruling Explained.

Lawyers for Protectmarriage dot.com said the marriage of same-sex couples should not have been allowed to resume because the Supreme Court had yet to issue its “final disposition” in the case, which under court rules occurs within 25 days of the judgment.

The Supreme Court allows the 25 days to give the losing party time to ask for reconsideration. Such requests are, however, rarely granted.

The emergency application went to Kennedy, who has jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit. He had the authority to act on it alone, or refer the matter to the full court.

Image credit: Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images

Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is anxiously waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on a key provision of the Voting Rights Act .

“At issue in the case is the heart of the law, Section 5, which protects voters in the jurisdictions with the worst history –and contemporary record — of discriminating against voters based on their race,” said Henderson on a  recent conference call.

Section 5 requires states (mostly in the South) with a history of discrimination to have any changes in voting procedures preapproved by federal officials in Washington. Covered jurisdictions include nine  states and parts of six more. Congress has reauthorized the law four times.

Henderson said the court should uphold the Voting Rights Act but warned of the consequences if it doesn’t. “If the court struck down or weakened Section 5, it would lead to the largest roll back of American democracy since the end of reconstruction.”

Oral Arguments:

At oral arguments in February, some of the conservative justices praised the landmark civil rights law passed in 1965 but questioned whether Congress was correct to reauthorize Section 5 in 2006.

Chief Justice John Roberts seemed concerned that Congress hadn’t done enough to explore the coverage formula that determines which states are singled out.  He asked Verrilli, “Is it the government’s submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?” he asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia compared it to a  “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia said. “And I am fairly confident it will be re-enacted in perpetuity unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different states differently, that there’s a good reason for it.

Listen to the audio here

Critics of Section 5

Critics of Section 5 point out that in 2009, in a separate case, Chief Justice John Roberts stressed that some members of the court have had “serious misgivings” about the constitutionality of Section 5.  Since the warning, Congress has done nothing.

Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network says that Congress has “thumbed its nose” at the court’s concern regarding Section 5.  ”If Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act does not survive this case,” she says, “it will be because Congress couldn’t be bothered to heed the  court’s repeated warnings to justify its unequal treatment of different states.”

The challenge to the law comes from lawyers for  Shelby County Alabama who argue that Congress exceeded its authority in 2006 when it extended the Voting Rights Act for another 25 years . They point out the federalism costs of Section 5 and says that it can only be justified with contemporary evidence of the kind of “unremitting and ingenious defiance” that existed when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. The lawyers also target the formula used to decide which jurisdictions should be covered. They say the formula is obsolete and no longer rational.

They  say that another section of the law — -Section 2 — can be used as an effective remedy to protect the rights of minority voters. Under Section 2 the burden is on the plaintiff who alleges that he or she has been victim of some form of discrimination who must file a lawsuit. Section 2 applies to all states.

Supporters:

The United States government is defending Section 5. “Everyone acknowledges,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli said in court, “that the Voting Rights Act made a huge difference in transforming the culture of blatantly racist vote suppression that characterized parts of this country for a century.” Verrilli said “Section 5 preclearance was the principal engine of that progress.”

A lower court upheld the law holding that Congress had done it’s homework  and acted on the basis of a legislative record “over 15,000 pages in length, and including statistics, findings by courts and the Justice Department, and firsthand accounts of discrimination. ”

A decision is expected by early summer.

The Justice Department issued a brief Friday urging the court to repeal Section 3 of DOMA when it hears a challenge to the act late next month. The portion bars the federal government from recognizing same sex marriages for health benefits, income tax purposes, and other issues.

In 2011, President Obama announced the executive branch would cease defending the 1996 law, although it remained on the books. Given that the Obama administration has been named a party to the case, the filing with the court does not come as a surprise, yet the equal protection issues covered in United States v. Windsor are relatively narrow in scope.

Instead, court watchers have been waiting to see whether the president would weigh in on a separate case involving gay marriage: California’s Proposition 8. The administration has until next week to decide whether to join other parties in challenging the ballot-approved state law, later overturned, that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. Friday’s brief could serve as hat-tip that the Justice Department is preparing for such a move.

See also: Will Obama join legal fight for gay marriage?

Any ruling regarding Prop 8 would have sweeping ramifications over a much broader issue than DOMA: Whether the U.S. Constitution guarantees a fundamental right to gay marriage.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. is not required to file a so-called “friend of the court” brief in that, but sources say the administration is considering the possibility at the highest levels.

In an interview Wednesday with San Francisco’s ABC station, KGO-TV, Obama said his administration had yet to reach a decision.

“I have to make sure I’m not interjecting myself too much into this process, particularly when we’re not party to the case,” he told KGO-TV. “I can tell you, though, that obviously my personal view is that I think that same-sex couples should have the same rights and be treated like everybody else.”

Historically his administration has left such decisions to the states; the administration has not previously offered an official statement on Prop 8 because the federal government was not directly affected by it.

Although the California case and DOMA do not directly intertwine Friday’s brief does offer a window into the language likely to be employed by the Justice Department in Prop 8, should it become involved. The brief can be found at the well-established SCOTUSblog.com.

“Gay and lesbian people are a minority group with limited political power,” reads the administration statement. “Although some of the harshest and most overt forms of discrimination against gay and lesbian people have receded, that progress has hardly been uniform (either temporally or geographically), and has in significant respects been the result of judicial enforcement of the Constitution, not political action.”

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has also filed a brief urging that the law be upheld, arguing gay-rights issues would be better left to the democratic process.

“Gays and lesbians are one of the most influential, best-connected, best-funded, and best-organized interest groups in modern politics, and have attained more legislative victories, political power, and popular favor in less time than virtually any other group in American history,” it says.

The House named itself a party to the case after the executive branch announced its decision to abandon the legislation.

ABC’s Ariane de Vogue contributed reporting.

(AP Photo)

Activists from the hacker collective known as Anonymous assumed control over the homepage of a federal judicial agency this morning.

In a manifesto left on the defaced page, the group demanded reform to the American justice system and what the activists said are threats to the free flow of information.

The lengthy essay largely mirrors previous demands from Anonymous, but this time the group also cited the recent suicide of Reddit co-founder and activist Aaron Swartz as has having “crossed a line” for their organization. Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison on computer fraud charges.

Prosecutors said he had stolen thousands of digital scientific and academic journal articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the goal of disseminating them for free.

Read More: Aaron Swartz’ Death Fuels MIT Probe, White House Petition to Oust Prosecutor

Anonymous says Swartz was “killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play.”

“There must be a return to proportionality of punishment with respect to actual harm caused,” it reads, also mentioning recent arrests of Anonymous associates by the FBI.

In their statement, the hackers say they targeted the homepage of the Federal Sentencing Commission for “symbolic” reasons.

The group claimed that if their demands were not met they would release a trove of embarrassing internal Justice Department documents to media outlets. Anonymous named the files after Supreme Court justices and provided hyperlinks to them from the defaced page.

As of press time the commission’s site had been taken offline but an earlier attempt by CNN to follow the files’ links yielded dead-ends, mostly offline sites.

The file names use an “.aes256″ suffix, denoting a common encryption protocol. The same system was used to encrypt the Wikileaks Afghan war documents before their release.

“Robert Bork was one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years. His impact on legal thinking in the fields of antitrust and constitutional law was profound and lasting. More important for the final accounting, he was a good man and a loyal citizen. May he rest in peace,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a statement.

President Reagan nominated Bork, who was at the time a federal judge, to the Supreme Court in 1987 to fill the seat of the more moderate Lewis F. Powell Jr. Bork’s confirmation hearing ignited a fiery constitutional debate as Bork outlined his conservative views. His nomination failed in the Senate.

During the hearings, Bork described his legal philosophy, particularly in regard to the theory of “originalism,” or the importance of using the framers and the founders of the Constitution to understand the meaning its language.

“How should a judge go about finding the law?” he asked senators in his opening statement. “The only legitimate way, in my opinion, is by attempting to discern what those who made the law intended. The intentions of the lawmakers govern whether the lawmakers are the Congress of the United States enacting a statute or whether they are those who ratified our Constitution and its various amendments.”

But his critics, particularly among those who favored abortion rights, seized on Bork’s attack on one case — Griswold v. Connecticut — that provided the foundation for Roe v. Wade.

His nomination ultimately failed by a vote of 42 to 59. His seat was eventually filled by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

“You asked him a question, he answered it,” said Commentary editor John Podhoretz  in a post on Wednesday. “You asked him about views of cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, involving the privacy of sexual acts in the bedroom, and he said the case had been wrongly decided not because there should be no privacy, but because he could locate no right to privacy in the Constitution. This was, he said, a matter for legislatures, not courts.”

From the start, Bork’s nomination faced fierce opposition. Liberal Sen.  Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said at the time, “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.”

Bork refused to withdraw his name from consideration. In a statement, he urged the Senate to go forward even though he knew his nomination would not survive. “The most serious and lasting injury in all of this is not to me, nor is it to all of those who have steadfastly supported my nomination and to whom I am deeply grateful,” he said. “Rather the damage is to the dignity and integrity of law and of public service in this country. I therefore wish to end this speculation — there should be a full debate and a final Senate decision.”

“His confirmation hearing proved a watershed in many ways,” said David Yalof, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. “Since Bork, nominees have learned the importance of framing their own past writings and their own past speeches in a manner that is less threatening, more innocuous and less likely to generate enthusiasm or anger.”

Yalof said the role of public interest groups had changed as well. “We’ve seen numerous interest groups who prepare actively, not only after a Supreme Court nomination has been announced but beforehand, reviewing lists of candidates expressing themselves both to the White House and the Senate judiciary.”

Long before she took the bench in 1995, Justice Elena Kagan ,who was then an assistant professor of  law at the University of Chicago, said in a book review that the last truly substantive hearing had been that of Bork. “The Bork hearings presented to the public a serious discussion of the meaning of the Constitution, the role of the court, and the views of the nominee; that discussion at once educated the public and allowed it to determine whether the nominee would move the court in the proper direction.” Kagan wrote. “Subsequent hearings have presented to the public a vapid and hollow charade in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints, and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis.”

At her own confirmation hearing in 2010, Kagan said that while she thought much of what she had written was correct, she had gotten some of the balance off. “I said, then, even then in that 1995 article, that it was inappropriate for a nominee to ever give any indication of how she would rule in a case that would come before the court … and I think it would be inappropriate to do so in a somewhat veiled manner, by essentially grading past cases.”

On Wednesday, the conservative judicial group the Federalist Society called Bork a “legal giant.” In a statement,  the group said, “Our nation owes Judge Bork an enormous debt of gratitude for his irrepressible and forceful defense of the Constitution as it was written and understood by our founding fathers, pioneering a jurisprudence of original meaning that has had enormous influence in the legal academy as well as in the courts.”

Writing for the majority in the 5-4 decision called District of Columbia v. Heller, Justice Antonin Scalia struck down a strict hand gun ban in Washington, D.C.

The ban on gun possession in the home “violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful fire arm in the home operable for the purposes of immediate self-defense,” Scalia wrote.

The landmark decision capped off a decades long debate between those who believed the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms and those who argue it protects a right to possess and carry in connection with militia service.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a blistering dissent on behalf of the liberals on the Court worried about other gun laws.

“I fear that the District’s policy choice may well be just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table,” he wrote.

Gun control advocates, dismayed at the ruling, took heart in Scalia’s words that “nothing in this opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”

Since the ruling (and another case called McDonald v. City of Chicago) challenges to gun laws have popped up across the country. Many gun laws have been upheld, but just last week a federal appeals court in Chicago struck down an Illinois law banning the carrying of guns in public places.

Writing for a 2-1 majority, Judge Richard A. Posner referenced the Heller decision, which applied to guns at home, and applied it to his case regarding the right to carry guns in public places. Posner gave the Illinois legislature 180 days to “craft a new gun law that will impose reasonable limitations consistent with public safety.”

Posner reasoned, “a Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower. ”

Illinois was the only state in the nation not to have some form of “conceal carry” law.

“I think the Supreme Court is likely to take up the issue, ” said Robert Cottrol of George Washington University Law School. He noted that the Illinois opinion seems at odds with an opinion in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals having to do with a New York law.

“One of the questions, it seems to me, is we don’t have a definitive statement in terms of Heller as to not only the right to keep arms, but the right to carry,” he said

Scalia, in his opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, acknowledged that the Supreme Court had not fully addressed regulations.

“But since this case represents this Court’s first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field,” he said.

Lee Goodman, an organizer at the Stop Conceal Carry Coalition, group that supports the Illinois law, said he believes the federal court in Illinois got it wrong.

“Heller was the first decision ever in the country that decided that the Second Amendment allowed private citizens to keep guns in their homes for personal protection,” Goodman said. “Now, a federal appeals court has decided that people also have a right to carry guns in public. Judge Posner was just plain wrong, there is nothing in Heller that suggests the conclusion he reached.”

Goodman is urging Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan to appeal the decision.

“The NICS never actually went down,” said FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer. “The call centers experienced two short outages – one of 14 minutes and one of 18 minutes. These outages were caused by exceptionally large call volume.”

NICS has access to information from computers at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, searching records that would prohibit a buyer from owning a gun, such as being a fugitive, having a felony conviction or charge, renouncing U.S. citizenship, or having been determined as mentally impaired. NICS was mandated by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and set up in November 1998.

According to FBI officials, when West Coast gun dealers opened for business on Black Friday, the system was briefly impacted and FBI officials decided to take call centers offline so that systems could catch up with calls already in the queue.

Over the three days from Nov. 23 to Nov. 25, there were a total of 283,423 NICS checks, compared with 215,192 last year.

“We had several delays that didn’t clear till the following morning,” said Chuck Nesby, chief firearms instructor at NOVA Firearms, a retail gun dealer,  in Falls Church, Va. In a brief interview with ABC News, Nesby  said he had only three customers who had to wait. “It went relatively smooth actually.”

Nesby said that sales at his store had been busy all week, noting that, following the presidential election, gun owners are concerned about new regulations. Nesby also cited a 15 percent increase in sales among women seeking guns for personal protection.

During the Oct. 16, 2012, presidential debate, Obama said he was open to reintroducing the assault weapons ban.

“Weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don’t belong on our streets,” he said. “And so what I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.”

“People are worried about gun control restrictions,” Nesby said.

According to the FBI, since 1998 there have been more than 155 million NICS checks.  Each check doesn’t represent a single gun, just a single background check transaction.

“NICS has a 99.92% availability rate over the past 12 months, so system outages do not occur very often,” Fischer said.

The state of Kansas already shows these types of ultrasound images — which are highly detailed and show more lifelike images than earlier ultrasounds — on its Health Department website under its “Woman’s Right to Know” law.  The push in Nebraska was first reported by the Lincoln Journal Star.

Nebraska law already requires that a woman receive an ultrasound before having an abortion in the state, and that a doctor display the images on a screen so that the woman can see them easily.   LB 675, known as the “Mother’s Right to See Her Unborn Child Ultrasound Bill,” passed the Nebraska state legislature in 2009 by a margin of 4o to 5. This new legislation would go a step further by requiring that the images be placed online as well.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that Nebraska Right to Life has been in contact with Kansas for Life, the group that helped champion the passage of Kansas’ law requiring 4-D images on a state website.

Requests for comment from Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the division of Planned Parenthood that covers Nebraska, were not immediately returned.

Ian Gershengorn, the Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general,  and House General Counsel Kerry Kircher said the two sides would be meeting shortly to discuss a possible settlement.

The ATF’s flawed “Fast and Furious” operation allowed firearms to “walk” across the U.S. border into Mexico in hopes of tracing the guns and locating major weapons traffickers.  The operation took a tragic turn when two weapons found in December 2010 at the scene of murdered U.S. Border Patrol Brian Terry were linked to Fast and Furious. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee spearheaded the congressional investigation into the ATF operation.

The House voted this summer to hold Attorney General Holder in contempt for not releasing the materials.  The House then sued Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this year after President Obama invoked executive privilege shielding Holder from turning over the documents. The Committee’s subpoena was seeking internal DOJ documents following the drafting of a February 4, 2011 letter sent to Congress that  contained inaccurate information about ATF’s operations. The letter was withdrawn by the Justice Department in December 2011.

A DOJ Inspector General report earlier this year cleared Holder of knowing about the ATF’s reckless tactics. The Inspector General’s review recommended 14 Justice Department and ATF officials for disciplinary and administrative review.

Tuesday during a news conference in Connecticut, Holder said, “I think there is a deal that can be struck.”

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has set a status hearing for January 10, 2013 to review the issue further.

Project Cyber Monday 3 marks the third year in a row that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has shut down the websites selling counterfeit goods.

“Everything from Ergobaby carriers to New Era hats, Nike sneakers, Tiffany jewelry, Oakley sunglasses and NFL jerseys, just to name a few. Even counterfeit Adobe software was for sale,” ICE Director John Morton said during a conference call with reporters.

ICE’s The National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center  and Homeland Security Investigations partnered with EUROPOL, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, to take down the 101 websites on U.S. internet servers and 31 websites with European domain names.

“Counterfeit Hermes purses, Christian Louboutin shoes and various Nike apparel, all of it fake, all of it substandard,” Morton said about the quality of the knock-off items.

According to figures from the Commerce Department intellectual property (IP) theft costs U.S. industries an estimated $200 billion to $250 billion annually.

“When IP rights are violated, jobs are lost, businesses are stolen and ultimately consumers are cheated. Remember, counterfeiters care about making money and only about making money. They don’t pay health care. They don’t pay pensions. They don’t pay taxes. They don’t care about the people that work for them and they don’t, frankly, care about the consumers who purchase the products,” Morton said.

ICE obtained court orders to shut the websites down after investigators purchased items from the websites and verified that the items were knock-offs. No arrests were announced as part of the cyber-Monday crackdown but Morton said the cases were ongoing and could lead to prosecutions.

Along with the website seizures ICE has also worked with PayPal to attempt to seize funds associated with the websites selling the counterfeit goods. Officials will not reveal how many PayPal accounts have been seized citing the ongoing investigation but noted that accounts in excess of $175,000 have been targeted. ICE officials noted that unsuspecting consumers may not only be buying  fake items, but that they are providing credit card and other financial information to fraudsters.