Word: laws
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Still, the liberating laws were there-largely unavailing and unenforced, but there. Last week the Supreme Court reached back across more than 100 years to use one of them to impose a major new rule on the country. The court's concern was racial discrimination in housing-long one of the most emotional of civil rights issues. Only three months ago, housing was the target of a new and hard-fought civil rights law, but the court's decision made the lengthy congressional argument over that law seem largely academic. The long-ignored Civil Rights...
...read the record of the debate that preceded passage of the 1866 bill, the court was persuaded that legislators of the time were well aware of the law's broad implications. Still, said Justice John Harlan in dissent, 100 years ago few legislators really contemplated as much reach as the court has found in the act: "The individualistic ethic of their time emphasized personal freedom and embodied a distaste for governmental interference. It seems to me that most of these men would have regarded it as a great intrusion on individual liberty for the government to take from...
Moreover, Harlan could not forget the nation's new open-housing law just passed by Congress. Though it does not start to go into effect until next year, it provides sanctions against those who discriminate in the sale of housing -except for individuals who sell their own property without the aid of a real estate agent, or who rent rooms in a boarding house that they own and live in. That is the legislative will of 1968, said Harlan, and the court should not go beyond it. The majority countered the argument by observing that Congress had carefully noted...
...real significance may only be that new life has been breathed into the 13th Amendment and its accompanying Reconstruction laws, and that the court has enunciated once again the ultimate illegality of racial prejudice. That old law, insisted Justice Stewart, means that Negroes have "the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much," then ending slavery implied "a promise that the nation cannot keep...
...first drink on each binge was a "voluntary exercise of his will." Powell, said the psychiatrist, was strongly-but not overwhelmingly-compelled to continue drinking once he started. Marshall also worried about what would happen if the court forbade the jailing of drunks. "The picture of the law's 'revolving door' of arrest, incarceration, release and rearrest is not a pretty one," he admitted, but he could see no satisfactory alternative. Even doctors critical of arresting drunks cannot agree on any treatment that would provide more of a cure than simple drying out in jail...