The legal status of pregnancy, fish, and Jerusalem

Editor’s note: The Supreme Court justices agree to hear only a small percentage of the 10,000 petitions they get on average each year. Only 75 to 80 cases make the cut. Here are a few of the notable cases coming up, continuing the list started last week by WORLD Radio’s Mary Reichard.

Young v. United Parcel Service. Are employers required to give the same accommodations for pregnant workers that they give disabled workers? After all, pregnancy is not considered a “disability” under the American with Disabilities Act.

A pregnant UPS driver was told by her midwife not to lift more than 20 pounds, so she asked her employer to give her lighter duty work as an accommodation. She knew other employees who had been injured got lighter duty when they asked for it. But UPS employees are required to be able to lift up to 70 pounds, and she was denied light duty.

The worker wound up taking an unpaid leave of absence and losing her medical coverage during that time. Two laws intersect here: The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act passed in the 1970s. Both the pro- and anti-life sides find common ground in this case. One purpose of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was to avoid forcing women to choose between a job or having an unwanted abortion because they can’t afford to leave their jobs to carry out the pregnancy.

UPS says it has no animus toward pregnant women and its accommodation rule is neutral because it excludes many kinds of employees from getting light duty, not just pregnant women.

Yates v. United States. This case involves a commercial fisherman who works the Gulf of Mexico. A field officer with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission boarded John Yates’ boat and saw some caught fish that were too small to keep under the law. He issued Yates a ticket and told him to come into port to turn them over.

By the time Yates got to port, he had a whole lot fewer of those little fish than what the officer counted earlier. Yates was charged with destroying and falsifying evidence because it looked like he had thrown those little fish back into the water to get out of his citation.

The controversy in the case deals with the definition of a “tangible object.” It’s against the law to conceal “a tangible object with the intent to obstruct” a government investigation. That phrase isn’t defined in the law, and the statute mostly talks about document destruction, not fish. So the court must decide whether a fish is, in fact, a tangible object.

Zivotovsky v. Kerry. A young American couple emigrated to Israel and gave birth to a boy there in 2002. He was born in Jerusalem, so the State Department issued him a passport listing his birthplace as “Jerusalem,” but his parents wanted it to say, “Jerusalem, Israel.” The United States does not recognize Jerusalem as part of any particular nation and hasn’t since 1948, when Israel was created. Both Palestinians and Israelis claim Jerusalem as their own, so to say Jerusalem is an Israeli city or an Arab city takes sides in a long-standing argument.

The Supreme Court took the case because it is rooted in the separation of powers. The Constitution gives the president the power to recognize foreign states. But Congress passed a law in 2003 telling the Secretary of State’s office to put “Israel” on passports if a family requests it.

Now it’s up to the judicial branch of government to break this impasse. A lower court had dismissed the case because it thought it was a political, not a legal, question. But the Supreme Court reinstated it and sent it back for another look. In thatruling, the court found Congress wrongly interfered with the president’s power to recognize foreign states. The president’s authority for the power is not listed in the Constitution explicitly, but presidents have successfully claimed it because the Constitution does grant them the power to send ambassadors out to other nations

Heien v. North Carolina. The high court is hearing another Fourth Amendment controversy over a police officer in North Carolina who noticed a car with one of its brake lights out. Assuming the missing light was a violation, the officer stopped the car. As it turned out, North Carolina requires only one working brake light, so the policeman shouldn’t have made the stop. But during this unnecessary stop, the officer discovered cocaine in the car, which eventually led to an indictment for cocaine trafficking for the car’s passenger.

The defendant argued that without the improper stop, the officer had no reasonable suspicion, so the whole case ought to be tossed out. The question for the Supreme Court is whether a traffic stop based on a police officer’s misunderstanding of the law violates the Fourth Amendment. In other words, is it reasonable for an officer to make a mistake of law?