“[The] right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” – Justice Harry Blackmun
Those words shook America back in 1973 and the Constitutional right to privacy was born. I don’t want to dwell on the pro- or anti-abortion position in this article, but I do want to look at how the Supreme Court came up with the right to privacy. It’s a fascinating study of how the Court can create legal standards even though the Constitution says all legislative power is vested in Congress.
The idea of judicial review is part of English Common Law, but it’s not used to set aside laws in that country unless they conflict with a treaty. When Justice Marshall asserted it for the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, he created a new form of judicial review, in which courts could essentially exercise veto power over a law if they could craft a Constitutional argument to justify it. Never mind that some of the nation’s founding fathers spoke out against the idea of judicial review: Justice Marshall not only brought it into American law, he made it into something more powerful that it had been anywhere in the world, before or since.
Since Marshall’s assertion of power, the Court has been able to do some incredible things to American politics, not all of them constructive. The Supreme Court has produced some decisions that critics derided as bad law based upon bad reasoning. Bad as those decisions may be, they were those of the Supreme Court and they stand. In the case of Roe, the amazing creation of the right to privacy stunned many observers and led to further discussion of what, exactly the Supreme Court should be able to do. Discussion could not change the fact that the Supreme Court could pretty much do whatever it wanted to do, so long as it made up a reason to do it. H.L. Mencken once quipped that a judge is a law school student that gets to grade his own papers. In the case of the Supreme Court, there’s no appeal to how the student got his grade: it’s always an A+.
While it’s true that just as the Supreme Court can craft stupid rulings, Congress can pass stupid laws. Those laws of Congress, however, are at least closer to the people who they ultimately have to answer to. The Supreme Court answers to no one, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out: “Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.”
(NOTE: This is *not* about abortion. This is about judicial review and how it can produce interesting results. Please keep your comments focused on judicial review.)
All of which makes it exceedingly important to have Supreme Court Justices who are at the lowest end of the ‘judicial activist’ scale…
How often does the power get abused though? I know we haven’t covered that much in class yet but I would think that the idea of judicial review has brought and is more beneficial than not have such a concept in place. Right?
WOW! so I am the Judical Review and I say that Mr. Webb is non opposed to giving everyone of his students an A+, the article at the bottom of the student handbook says that this is why he should.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/01/court_efficiency_strategy_has.html
Court efficiency strategy has support of adversary lawyers, but not judges.
I’d say the abuse comes mostly in the form of corporations using the 14th Amendment to avoid regulations.
What part of the 14th amendment do corporations abuse? Due process? Maybe protecting themselves from the state? Or the Equal protection clause? Demanding that corporations are people and should be prosecuted as such–sidestepping regulation?
So judicial review basically sets the precedents that interpret laws for years and years to come. What happens when there are so many precedents that the original intention of the law becomes meaningless/useless?
Well circumstances tend to change from when laws of the past are passed to the present. I think Judicial Review, while occasionally subject to abuse, is quite necessary. This way people can go to court and not worry too much about some ridiculous standard or other from the past. The whole separate but equal thing was just stupid though… glad they fixed that…
Okay, so doesn’t Judicial Review usually step in before Amendments are changed to fit changing times?
Judicial Review is just as subject to bias as any other branch of government. We’ve talked about how many presidents that have had scandals? What happens in politics is constantly changing and is always subjective, if anything the court puts it in perspective. While the judges may not always change with changing times, they are able to set precedents (like they ^^^^ said) based on interpretations of laws and hopefully settle some controversy in various issues. 🙂