Today’s conservative Roberts Court is a bastion of First Amendment freedom as was the liberal Warren Court half a century ago. But the winners are different. Establishment insiders win today whereas outsiders won most often during the Warren years. On its 200th birthday in 1991, the First Amendment had developed into a powerful shield against
The Bill of Rights has helped create what is arguably the freest enduring society in history. It wasn’t always that way. The original Constitution didn’t have a Bill of Rights. Once the Bill of Rights was added, it didn’t apply for a century to state governments. As recently as 90 years ago, no one had
The most important words in the 14th Amendment of 1868 – maybe in the entire Constitution – say no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny any person…the equal protection of the laws.” These promises of liberty, due process and equality eventually remade the country,
Is the Constitution dead or alive? The late Justice Antonin Scalia, long the chief advocate of originalism on the Supreme Court, was unequivocal. “The constitution that I interpret is not living but dead,” he said in a 2008 speech. His counterpart, the late Justice William J. Brennan Jr., intellectual leader of the Warren Court, was
The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has resulted in the steepest drop in respect for the U.S. Supreme Court in almost a century – the steepest since the Roosevelt court packing crisis of 1937. James L. Gibson, a political science professor at Washington University and national expert on the subject, wrote in September
