Word: legalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...November 1955, Earl Warren, longtime governor of California and new Chief Justice of the U.S., was remarkably candid in specifying his hopes for the direction of U.S. justice over the next quarter-century. Satisfied that "the more cynical forms of 'legal realism' are growing less fashionable," Warren declared for a credo of legal idealism. "It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive," he wrote in FORTUNE. "The beginning of justice is the capacity to generalize and make objective one's private sense of wrong." Earl Warren's Supreme Court...
...Road-Pickers. In the Du Pont and Jencks cases, many a legal observer could agree with the aims of the Supreme Court's legal idealism while regretting that it was not more firmly anchored in legal realism. For example, such critics, with no particular brief for Du Pont, nonetheless thought that the majority decision had taken a highly selective, hotly debatable set of facts and used them to extend a law dealing with stock "acquisitions" so that it applied to a "reasonable probability" existing 30 years later. And such observers, even while agreeing that Jencks had a case...
...pattern set by the Supreme Court in its school-desegregation decisions. There, many friends of desegregation were pained in their belief that the court relied on sociology texts instead of lawbooks and the Constitution of the U.S., believed the same points could have been more firmly made through purely legal reasoning...
...Court, Republican Charles Evans Whittaker, has not yet been around long enough to become identified with any group. (The arguments in both the Du Pont and Jencks cases had started before Whittaker joined the court.) But it is in Whittaker that the Supreme Court may find its spokesman for legal realism as against Warren's legal idealism. Asked about his attitudes of legal interpretation, Whittaker set out a signpost of his own: "I read the law only for an understanding of its meaning, and apply and enforce it in accordance with my understanding of its meaning." This doctrine...
...appeal to the Supreme Court, the Jencks defense asked a new trial in which, specifically, Judge Thomason would be required to act as screener. It was this specific appeal that the Government argued against. In the legal point and counterpoint, the idea never came up of turning the FBI files over to the defense directly. But this was precisely the idea that the Supreme Court turned into a rule of law. Wrote Justice Brennan, with Chief Justice Warren, Justices Black, Douglas and Frankfurter concurring: "Because only the defense is adequately equipped to determine the effective use [of reports...