Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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At this juncture in American history, when the citizenry seems to require frequent reminders of the landmark decisions and actions that poured and preserved the foundation of our constitutional democracy, we would do well to recall the transformative importance of Near v. Minnesota (1931), in which the Supreme Court delivered a ruling that built a wall of protection for freedom of the press against governmental censorship. The virtues of Near v. Minnesota are exhausting to recount. The Court’s decision defined freedom of the press. It trumpeted...
The enormous pressures and hardships—financial, medical and psychological-- inflicted on the citizenry by the Great Depression required creative governmental responses that stressed the limits of the Constitution. In the face of the nation’s gravest economic crisis, states struggled to find ways and means to keep Americans in their homes and on their farms. The historic job losses meant that millions could not meet mortgage obligations. Foreclosures forced citizens from their homes and into the streets, without any hope of state assistance sin...
Two hundred years ago, in the landmark case of Cohens v. Virginia (1821), the future of our Constitution, the aspirations of national unity, and the status and role of the federal judiciary itself, were before the Supreme Court. We have seldom seen in one case the coalescence of so many issues fundamental to the integrity of our constitutional system. The stakes for America could not have been higher. If the Supreme Court could not exercise appellate authority over state court decisions, then each state would be free to interpret federal l...
The controversial use by college admission committees of an applicant’s race was the subject of a five-hour hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court this week in cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The lengthy oral argument brought to a fever pitch the long simmering question of the constitutionality of race conscious programs—affirmative action policies-- that were upheld in the Court’s landmark ruling in 1978 in Regents of University of California v. Bakke. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the use...
The 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr, lost in the mists of early American legal history stirs, at most, only feint recollections among members of the Bar, let alone the general public. But Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark ruling that the president is required to obey subpoenas represents a principle that is fundamental to American Constitutionalism and the rule of law. Marshall’s ruling is a grand reminder of the resonance--in the fanatical politics of our time --of the American ideal that all men are equal in the eyes of the law. The pri...
In 1996, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark opinion in United States v. Virginia that exalted women’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by ending the 157-year-old tradition of all-male education at the Virginia Military Institute, one of the nation’s most distinguished military colleges. Writing for a 7-1 majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described VMI as “incomparable,” a school justly known for its “unparalleled record as a leadership training program,” dating back to its founding in 1839. The problem was,...
The U.S. Supreme Court’s long, tortured road to recognizing women’s constitutional rights in the late 20th Century was preceded by victories based, not on the principle of their equality, but on the perception of their inferiority. The Court had laid the groundwork in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), by declaring women weak and therefore unfit for the practice of law. Their place, said the High Tribunal, was in the home. They required protection from the ugly occupations of civil life. In 1908, the Court, in Muller v. Oregon, rendered a his...
Not every landmark Supreme Court decision champions the rights of Americans or limits governmental power in a manner that preserves and protects our constitutional democracy. Some seminal rulings shock the conscience, rock the foundation of the nation and reflect crude and outdated prejudices which, when viewed from afar, are reminders that we have, indeed, made some progress. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bradwell v. State of Illinois (1873) is such a case. Myra Bradwell held a law degree and had practiced law in Vermont before moving t...
American legal history firmly rejects the view advanced by some commentators and politicians that the president, not Congress, may decide when to initiate war. It was, of course, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in a series of rulings at the dawn of the republic that Congress alone possesses the constitutional authority, by virtue of the War Clause, to declare war and to determine its nature and scope. In 1806, in U.S. v. Smith, Justice William Paterson, who had been a leading delegate to the Constitutional Convention, held, while riding...
Little v. Barreme, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1804, may be among the least familiar landmark rulings ever rendered, but it settled momentous constitutional and legal questions that plumb the depths of American history. In an opinion written by the great Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court held that it is for Congress, not the president, to decide when to initiate war and author lesser military hostilities. It held that the president, in his capacity as Commander in Chief, is bound by the statutory instructions, directions and...
In a stunning decision on April 12, 1937, with enormous constitutional, economic and societal importance, the U.S. Supreme Court, in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, upheld a law that transformed workers’ rights and labor relations. The Wagner Act of 1935 guaranteed the right of workers to organize labor unions. It also aimed to protect the right of employees to bargain collectively with their employers. The statute defined types of interference with these rights as unfair labor practices and empow...
The Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), set against the backdrop of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial court-packing plan, shocked the nation when it upheld state authority to impose a minimum wage law, less than a year after it had declared that such laws violated the freedom of contract protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. The New Deal Court’s abrupt about-face marked the beginning of the High Tribunal’s rapidly changing jurisprudence. In the early and mid-1930s, the Co...
In 1947, in the context of changing attitudes about race and a historic shift in federal policy on the practice of segregation in housing, punctuated by President Harry S. Truman’s spirited attack on discrimination in America, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark decision in Shelley v. Kraemer that rendered racial covenants unenforceable. In a 6-0 opinion authored by Chief Justice Fred Vinson, the Court destroyed the most efficient and systematic tool for maintaining Jim Crow traditions and denying racial minorities from accessing decent h...
Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), entrenched in American folklore by a best-selling book and a popular film, was one of the most famous decisions rendered by the Warren Court. In a landmark opinion that reflected the Supreme Court’s determination to create one rule for rich and poor alike, the High Tribunal held for the first time that the Sixth Amendment requires states to provide for court-appointed attorneys in all felony cases. Justice Hugo Black wrote the Court’s 9-0 opinion: “From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and l...
In a blockbuster, landmark ruling that rolled back the tides of racism and White Supremacy, the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia (1967), affirmed marriage as a fundamental right protected by the 14th Amendment when it struck down a state law that banned interracial marriage. Just a dozen years after the Court had held in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional and, in a historical context in which racial violence and southern resistance to civil rights laws and rulings captured daily headli...
Justice Rufus Peckham’s opinion in the landmark case of Lochner v. New York (1905), cemented the Supreme Court’s embrace of the liberty of contract doctrine and its tilt toward the laissez-faire economic philosophy of the day. Justice Peckham’s passion for substantive due process and the Court’s assertion of authority to substitute its own preferences for those of state lawmakers unleashed an enduring debate on the methods of constitutional interpretation and the scope of a state’s police power. His opinion propelled “the general rule of abs...
In its recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court denounced judicial resort to the doctrine of substantive due process to pour the foundation for the fundamental right to access contraceptives, abortion and same-sex marriage. Since then, the “reading public,” to borrow from James Madison, has expressed deep interest in the origins of the doctrine. A search for the early development of substantive due process will reveal the Court’s landmark ruling in 1905, in Lochner v. New York. I...
The Supreme Court’s decision in Korematsu v. United States (1944), upholding the forced evacuation of American citizens of Japanese descent from their homes for no reason other than their ancestry was, as scholars have characterized it, a national disaster, one that will live in infamy. For the first time in our nation’s history the Court, in one swift blow, significantly undermined the writ of habeas corpus, a civil right fundamental to American Constitutionalism. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order No. 9066, issued on Febru...
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Korematsu v. United States (1944), upheld a government program that required the exclusion of Japanese American citizens from areas along the West Coast on the premise, without benefit of any evidence, that they represented a threat to engage in sabotage and espionage on behalf of America’s enemy in World War II. The decision represented a swift plunge, as Justice Frank Murphy wrote in dissent, into “the ugly abyss of racism,” for it promoted the unsavory proposition that citizens could be punishe...
Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark opinion for the Supreme Court in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), articulated foundational principles that have shaped American constitutional law to this day. In words that have become a legendary incantation, Chief Justice Marshall wrote: “We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . a constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs.” The Court’s ruling on key questions enmeshed in the controversy about t...
The constitutional issues that the Supreme Court addressed—and answered—in the landmark case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), have shaped our nation’s constitutional law for two centuries. McCulloch is of such surpassing importance that a prominent biographer of Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the Court’s unanimous opinion, said that if Marshall’s “fame rested solely on this one effort, it would be secure.” The importance of the issues before the Court—the extent of federal power, the limits of state authority, the nature of the U...
The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), widely regarded by scholars as the most important decision ever rendered by the nation’s High Tribunal, provided firm footing for national action and continues to shape American constitutional law. The Court’s iconic opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, was immersed in high drama and extensive public interest, and featured the imprint of four of the nation’s leading attorneys. The case itself addressed three issues of transcendent importance to the future of the...
The Steel Seizure Case (1952) raised the critical issue of the constitutional prescription for confronting emergencies. President Harry Truman, facing a nationwide steel strike, which he believed would undermine America’s participation in the Korean War and the rebuilding of Europe, boldly asserted the claim of a presidential emergency power to seize the steel mills to maintain production. The Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling, rejected Truman’s assertion of inherent executive authority. Justice Felix Frankfurter, in a concurring opi...
The Supreme Court’s rejection in the Steel Seizure Case of President Harry Truman’s assertion of an inherent executive power to seize the steel mills to thwart a nationwide strike, generated questions about the location in the Constitution of authority to confront emergencies. The framers of the Constitution were entitled to believe that they had succeeded in subordinating the executive to the Constitution. Indeed, that was one of their greatest accomplishments. Still, there remained the problem of emergency and it confronted the principle of t...
In his 6-3 opinion for the Supreme Court in the landmark case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), Justice Hugo Black rejected President Harry Truman’s assertion of an inherent executive power to seize the steel industry as a means of thwarting a nationwide steel strike. Black’s opinion, a historic rebuke to sweeping claims of presidential authority, provided a textbook lesson on the constraining force of the separation of powers doctrine and why it prohibited President Truman from issuing an executive order that encroached on leg...
