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How the Supreme Court Has Invoked the Declaration

For nearly two centuries the Supreme Court has invoked the Declaration of Independence. Much of that time, it has used the Declaration to define the meaning of racial equality.

When the slave ship Amistad ran aground near New York in 1837, antislavery activists seized the opportunity and tried to incorporate their understanding that "all men" included slaves who should be free unless they lived in slave states. The Court rejected the federal government's argument that the slaves should be returned to their owners, by asking rhetorical questions such as this:

Did the people of the United States, whose government is based on the great principles of the revolution, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, confer upon the federal, executive or judicial tribunals, the power of making our nation accessories to such atrocious violations of human rights?

As the conflict over slavery grew in the 1840s and 1850s, Chief Justice Taney decided to de-rail the antislavery forces by declaring that the founders had never included slaves as anything but property. They were never part of "the people" he asserted in the Dred Scott Case.

When the Declaration was written, Taney argued, all European nations had conceived Africans as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations." This opinion was, of course, so divisive, and offensive to many Americans, that Lincoln and other Republicans received an enormous boost in their campaigns to end slavery.

Jefferson's words have appeared frequently in more recent judgments of the Supreme Court. When the Little Rock School Board integrated Central High School in 1957, white opponents of desegregation asked the Supreme Court to declare their riot legitimate protest.

The Court rejected the argument, implying that the Declaration of Independence had ushered in a government of laws that had no place for unlawful rebellions. The Court commended the board for trying to comply with its order to desegregate with "all deliberate speed."

In recent years Justice Stevens has used the principles of "equality" and "liberty" in the Declaration to argue, in Fullilove v. Klutznick, that cities cannot constitutionally create set-aside programs for minority-owned businesses because the government would be reverting to the kind of business patronage that the Revolution ended.

He also cited the Declaration in arguing that the state should not stop the family of a woman in a coma from turning off life support because, in Nancy Cruzan's case, life and liberty were not synonymous. Jefferson's words still sway the high court.