Word: griswold
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Thus Bork criticizes Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court decision which held that a law banning birth control violated a constitutional right to privacy. Since privacy is not mentioned in the Bill of Rights, how can a judge find such a right without subjecting the Constitution to a never-ending spiral of subjectity based more on personal views than on the Constitution's text? Only the most niggardly construction, Bork feels, can be based on truly neutral principles...
Bork's ire is most provoked by the Supreme Court's famous decision over the past 20 years protecting what it deemed invasions of rights to privacy fundamental to, though not explicit in, the text of the Constitution. The anticontraceptive law challenged in Griswold v. Connecticut may have been "nutty," as Bork says. Worse, still, was Justice William O. Douglas' opinion in the case, which held that the statute violated individual rights that "emanated" from "penumbras" of the Constitution...
...reserved for the court's expansions of individual and civil rights in the past four decades. Among the decisions that Bork has blasted as groundless and unconstitutional: a seminal 1948 decision, Shelley v. Kraemer, that denied state courts the authority to enforce racially restrictive agreements between sellers and buyers; Griswold v. Connecticut, which in 1965 struck down a state law forbidding the use of contraceptives even by married couples; the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that extended the right of privacy to protect abortion; and the 1978 Bakke v. University of California decision that permitted affirmative action, though it disallowed...
...believes, the majority through its elected officials may impose its will on the minority, even if judges consider the resulting laws to be insidious or unwise. For example, though Bork has argued that the court did not have the constitutional justification to strike down the anticontraceptive law in the Griswold case, he has spoken disparagingly of the statute itself. "Even if we assume that courts have superior capacities for dealing with matters of principle," he writes, "it does not follow that courts have the right to impose more principle upon us than our elected representatives give...
Privacy. The "right of privacy" that the court enunciated in the Griswold contraception ruling, and that Bork has frequently disparaged, restrains government intrusion in matters bearing upon marriage, sexual activity and family life. In addition to providing a rationale for the court's pro-abortion decision, privacy has been invoked in arguments favoring gay rights. In a 1984 ruling that upheld the Navy's discharge of a petty officer for homosexual conduct, Bork aired the view that whatever the Supreme Court may have meant by privacy, it did not cover homosexual relations. Last year, a 5-to-4 court majority...