Tag Archives: these-decisions
Balkanization goes to town on Chicago’s brief
Right here . A few samples: “In the city’s attempt to preserve its weapons ban, it proves too much, essentially urging the Supreme Court to find that protection of the Bill of Rights and other fundamental liberties against state infringement has no basis in constitutional text or history, and is instead achieved solely by judicial implication. To make matters worse, Chicago’s brief makes common cause with precedent that has been properly labeled by civil rights leaders as “among the most misdirected in the history of the Court” and celebrates a post-Civil War Court that looked the other way while Jim Crow perpetuated decades of discrimination and violent rights suppression.” “Chicago’s repeated deference to these decisions of the post-Civil War Court—beyond merely respecting them as precedent, the city’s brief calls them a “venerated” line of decisions—is disconcerting.
Full StoryNew article by Randy Barnett
“Whence Comes Section One? The Abolitionist Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment.” It explores the many ways in which abolitionist legal thought influenced the 14th Amendment. The leadership of the 39th Congress were abolitionists to a man, and shared legal understandings that did not require explanation.
Full Story