Word: courtly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Supreme Court did not use the power Marbury gave it for 54 years. When it did, with the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which struck down the Missouri Compromise and declared slaves to be property with no rights as citizens, it helped start the Civil War. During Reconstruction, the Constitution was amended to ensure that blacks were treated equally: no state, said the majestically vague 14th Amendment, shall deprive persons of "equal protection" or "due process" under...
Judges eventually found in the 14th their greatest tool of judicial review, but not for the reasons intended by the amendment's drafters. At the beginning of the 20th century, the 14th was used principally to protect property, not the disadvantaged. The court protected business from government regulation, thwarted unionization and struck down minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws. That trend began to fade only in the late 1930s, after F.D.R. threatened to "pack" the court with liberals to get his New Deal through...
...coming of the Warren Court, the roles were reversed. It was legislatures that were resisting reform, and the court that was pushing social change. The landmark of that era was Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which established that separate was not equal in public schools. The 14th acquired new meaning; judges became guardians of the poor and forgotten. The criminally accused were guaranteed the right to free counsel when indigent, the right to a jury in a felony case, and, with Miranda (1966), the right to be told of their rights before confessing. Free-speech guarantees were widely extended...
...Burger Court of the 1970s has proved less liberal, but it is hardly a model of judicial restraint. Rather, it is what scholars call "selectively activist," which some say means that its activism depends on whether or not it likes the result. One of its most activist decisions remains Roe vs. Wade (1973), which found in the Constitution an implicit right for women to have abortions. Although equal protection has of late been invoked less in the cause of the poor and the black, it has been extended to just about everyone else, including aliens, bastards and even...
While listening to his brethren's legalistic arguments at Supreme Court conferences during the '60s, the late Chief Justice Earl Warren would impatiently interject, "Yes, yes,'yes. But is it right? Is it good?" His stance remains at once noble and unsettling. Says Stanford Law Professor Gerald Gunther: "Part of the price of their remarkable independence, tenure, reverence, is that judges are under a special obligation to justify their opinions, even if they got there by their guts originally." Judges are supposed to look for the intent of lawmakers, heed precedent, and hesitate to read their...