Replies

Most conservative scholars mark the New Deal and Warren Court eras as being the radical departures from Supreme Court precedent. It is not at all clear to me what decisions you are referring to as "beginning about 1900" other than the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Notably, the decision in Lochner v. New York in 1905 striking down a state limit on bakery worker hours as violative of freedom of contract is usually seen as a high water mark of traditional Supreme Court constitutionalism.

One of the most destructive doctrines in US legal history gradually began to emerge around the turn of the 20th century - the infamous and utterly unconstitutional Incorporation Doctrine allowing the feds to enforce the first ten amendments via a twisted reading and application of the 14th Amendment bringing on a subsequent parade of horribles.

Without a word of explanation, these post-1900 decisions (don't have the names, but not hard to find decisions that gave the feds power to enforce any of the first ten amendments upon the states) overturned the precedent of the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases which limited the 14A to its original intent by its ratifiers: giving ex-salves full citizenship status.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a force against sound constitutional reasoning around the turn of the century.

I don't have the cases at hand, but it was a very subtle and gradual shift that began to take place where the rationale of Court opinions began to speak in terms of "public interest" (AKA the government) instead of individual interest.

Would be a good research project. I have a site https://sonsofconstitutionalliberty.com/ where I'm sure I will need to detail this stuff out more at some point on a more case-by-case basis but I haven't done that yet.

One of the most destructive doctrines in US legal history gradually began to emerge around the turn of the 20th century - the infamous and utterly unconstitutional Incorporation Doctrine allowing the feds to enforce the first ten amendments via a twisted reading and application of the 14th Amendment bringing on a subsequent parade of horribles.

Without a word of explanation, these post-1900 decisions (don't have the names, but not hard to find decisions that gave the feds power to enforce any of the first ten amendments upon the states) overturned the precedent of the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases which limited the 14A to its original intent by its ratifiers: giving ex-salves full citizenship status.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a force against sound constitutional reasoning around the turn of the century.

I don't have the cases at hand, but it was a very subtle and gradual shift that began to take place where the rationale of Court opinions began to speak in terms of "public interest" (AKA the government) instead of individual interest.

Would be a good research project. I have a site https://sonsofconstitutionalliberty.com/ where I'm sure I will need to detail this stuff out more at some point on a more case-by-case basis but I haven't done that yet. But in the meantime, it would be too hard to verify what I'm talking about. Robert Bork's landmark book, The Tempting of America, argues mainly the same thing and sites many cases.

FYI, post #88 is the better version of post #87 (got screwed up while it took FR forever to finish posting).