Free Republic

PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) May 18, 1896. This was a petition for writs of prohibition and certiorari originally filed in the supreme court of the state by Plessy, the plaintiff in error, against the Hon. John H. Ferguson, judge of the criminal district court for the parish of Orleans, and setting forth, in substance, the following facts: That petitioner was a citizen of the United States and a resident of the state of Louisiana, of mixed descent, in the proportion of seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood; that the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in...

A decent respect for the Constitution should cause the Supreme Court to reconsider some past decisionsAT THE OUTSET OF Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter asked a series of questions about the rather arcane subject of stare decisis, which is the judicial practice of following prior decisions. Eventually the questions took an odd turn, with Specter asking Alito whether he agreed that the right to abortion had special immunity from reconsideration, that is, whether it is "super-precedent." Alito parried this by declining to "get into categorizing precedents as super-precedents or super-duper precedents." That sort of terminology, Alito...

The celebration of Rosa Parks's extraordinary contribution to America presents an excellent opportunity for me to summon all the strength at my command so that I may shout at the top of my lungs: "Thank God Almighty for liberal judicial activism." I suppose this makes me a heretic in a town where radical right dogma reigns supreme, especially after the trashing of White House counsel and now-withdrawn Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. But I'll still pay tribute to activist judges. After all, it was a default by elected leaders that led an "activist" Supreme Court to decide in 1956 that...

While news coverage tends to focus on developments in the White House and with Congress, most folks pay little or no attention to what happens on the Supreme Court. That's a shame, says constitutional scholar and former Reagan Justice Department official Mark Levin, since the Court wields so much unchecked power affecting the everyday lives of Americans, often in ways detrimental to the nation. Released today, Levin's new book "Men in Black" is nothing short of an indictment of the high court, detailing judicial abuses from its founding in 1801 right through modern day decisions on abortion and homosexual rights...