Word: californiaisms
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...against gays, and mandated the state issue marriage licenses to gay couples. In a wide-ranging interview, Brown told TIME that his view of the legal merits of the case had evolved over the past several weeks, and explained why he now thinks the right to gay marriage in California is as fundamental as such bedrock principles as the right to property and to liberty itself...
...look at the question from a much broader perspective. "Some of the staff said 'wait a minute, there is another way of looking at this.' The idea was that gay marriage involves a basic liberty interest, rights that formed a foundation for our Constitution, that we enjoyed even before California became a state. That was a new way to look at this." Rights like that, he came to believe, can't be taken away, at least not by something as simple as constitutional amendment by popular vote. Instead, those rights he said, are "inalienable" in the same sense that...
...whether rights secured under the state Constitution's safeguard of liberty as an 'inalienable' right may intentionally be withdrawn from a class of persons by an initiative... This litigation, perhaps for the first time, poses a more fundamental question: Is the initiative-amendment power wholly unfettered by the California's Constitution's protection of the People's fundamental right to life, liberty and privacy?" In other words, aren't some rights so sacred that they can't be taken away...
...Friday, Brown's legal brief ignited a statewide debate among legal scholars, with discussion of the argument dominating law professor list-servs and e-mail lists. "It's creative and contains thoughtful insights," says Vikram Amar, a constitutional law professor and dean of academics at the University of California-Davis. "It profoundly highlights the almost paradoxical character of American constitutionalism: That minority rights exists only to the extent that the majority stands behind them...
Amar, who has taught at all four law schools in the University of California system, says America has always struggled with the seemingly conflicting ideas about the sanctity of basic rights like those in the Bill of Rights and ability of the majority to take them away. "It strikes us as strange the notion that minorities should have to depend on a majority to confer something we think of as a right," Amar says. "But the idea of popular sovereignty, which is another way of saying majority rule, means just that. We can make sure that majorities are reflective, deliberative...