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To: EternalVigilance

So I guess Dredd Scott and Kuramatsu still is the law of the land too!


5 posted on 09/30/2015 11:37:55 AM PDT by GraceG (Protect the Border from Illegal Aliens, Don't Protect Illegal Alien Boarders...)
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To: GraceG

Exactly - The Supreme Court can be wrong.

1) Dred Scott v. Sandford:

In his majority opinion Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote:

“[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”

This was only the second time (to that date) that the Supreme Court had ruled an act of Congress unconstitutional (the Missouri Compromise of 1820), the first being the case Marbury v. Madison wherein the court ruled the Judiciary Act of 1789 invalid (or at least a part of it). Many constitutional scholars consider this 7-2 decision the worst in US history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

2) Plessy v. Ferguson:

In this case (1896) the Supreme Court in a 7-1 vote gave explicit constitutional sanction to the idea of the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case was from Louisiana. This was “settled law” until overruled by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954! In a stinging dissent Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote:

[I]n view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Of course Justice Harlan was vindicated. Though outnumbered his opinion eventually became law. I used to cite his dissent in my classes as one of the greatest ever written. That dissent always brings the words of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes to mind “… A dissent in a court of last resort, is an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day, when a later decision may possibly correct the error into which the dissenting judge believes the court to have been betrayed.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson

3) Korematsu v. United States:

In this case the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold Executive Order 9066 which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps (a nice way of saying concentration camps) during the Second World War regardless of citizenship! Justice Jackson was one of the three justices to dissent. Justice Jackson was also one on my heroes but we’ll save him for a later day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States

Again, in each case these decisions were “settled law.” And in each case the majority decisions were inimical to our ideas of liberty. In conclusion please pay heed to the words of Learned Hand who served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (Hand has been quoted more often by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States than any other lower-court judge.)

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”


62 posted on 09/30/2015 4:53:11 PM PDT by donaldo
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