June 28, 2010
Although the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in favor of gun rights is getting most of the attention during its busy, final day before a three-month recess, there were several other significant rulings. Here are the highlights:
- The justices ruled by 5-4 that the University of California's Hastings Law School can deny official recognition, funding, and campus facilities to a Christian student...
June 17, 2010
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has floated the idea of passing a new law to allow a retired Supreme Court justice to sit on a case in which a current justice has recused, to avoid 4–4 ties.
This proposal, reported on June 16 by National Law Journal's Blog of Legal Times based on an interview with Leahy, who said he had drafted a bill and would probably introduce it, would be...
May 9, 2010
Justice John Paul Stevens, who in most portrayals has migrated from the center of the court when appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1975 to its left flank, has told several reporters that his ideology has not really changed much. Rather, according to Stevens, he has remained about where he always was, while newer and younger appointees have pushed the court to the right.
The record suggests...
March 6, 2010
The news from the March 2 oral argument in the Supreme Court's biggest pending case was that the five conservative justices seem poised to make the Second Amendment right to bear arms applicable to state and local gun controls, as well as federal. In the process, they will strike down the unusually strict handgun bans in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill. -- probably in June.
But debate about the gun...
February 13, 2010
Suppose that your child is being held in a secret location by kidnappers who threaten to kill her within two hours unless they're paid a ransom of $100,000 that you can't raise. Suppose further that the FBI has just captured one of the kidnappers.
Would you want the agents to say this? "You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and...
January 22, 2010
The Supreme Court's five conservatives are properly protective of American citizens' First Amendment rights to spend as much of their money as they wish on political speech, both individually and by funding nonprofit advocacy groups. But this was no justification for the court's blockbuster, precedent-smashing Jan. 21 decision unleashing corporate executives to pour unlimited amounts of...
January 22, 2010
For decades conservatives have accused liberal Supreme Court majorities of judicial activism, by which I mean sweeping aside democratically adopted laws and deeply rooted societal traditions to impose their own policy preferences based on highly debatable interpretations of the Constitution's language and established meaning. On Thursday, the five more conservative justices -- and in particular...
July 29, 2009
"Many conservatives oppose Judge [Sonia] Sotomayor's nomination because she does not appear to support originalism.... But when it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint [by claiming] that the Constitution's 14th Amendment mandated a policy of strict colorblindness by state and local governments.... The...
July 23, 2009
The bumper-sticker liberal view of constitutional interpretation might begin with President Obama's assertions that "the Constitution... is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world," and that "we need somebody who's got the heart -- the empathy -- to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom" or "to be...
July 20, 2009
Perhaps the most remarkable exchange during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing came on Tuesday, when President Obama's nominee flatly repudiated his judicial philosophy.
This is all the more striking because it's a good bet that the Obama team knew it was coming. White House lawyers spent days prepping Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the hearings, and it was quite predictable that she would be...
July 18, 2009
As one who had hoped for a moderately liberal, intellectually honest nominee and feared the possibility of an unprincipled left-liberal ideologue steeped in identity politics, I am having trouble figuring out Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., captured my own puzzlement when he told Sotomayor on Tuesday that although her 17-year judicial record struck him as "left-of-center...
July 17, 2009
From National Journal's July 18 issue:
As one who had hoped for a moderately liberal, intellectually honest nominee and feared the possibility of an unprincipled left-liberal ideologue steeped in identity politics, I am having trouble figuring out Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., captured my own puzzlement when he told Sotomayor on Tuesday that although her 17-year judicial...
July 13, 2009
As night follows day, the spectacle unfolding as 19 senators pose their questions to Judge Sonia Sotomayor will include a succession of demands for candor about her views -- especially from Republicans -- which the nominee will meet with ducking, dodging and evasion.
Sotomayor will steadfastly claim, as did all of the current justices, that it would be improper to disclose her views on issues...
July 10, 2009
For all the publicity about the Supreme Court's 5-4 reversal of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's decision (with two colleagues) to reject a discrimination suit by a group of firefighters against New Haven, Conn., one curious aspect of the case has been largely overlooked.
That is the likelihood that but for a chance discovery by a fourth member of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the now-triumphant 18...
June 26, 2009
The Supreme Court's decision on Thursday faulting school officials' intrusive semi-strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl suspected of hiding drugs that were forbidden in school, but not very dangerous, has generated spirited commentaries. See, for example, Dahlia Lithwick's in Slate, suggesting that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens "turned this ship around, I suspect,...
June 8, 2009
To Josh Patashnik of The New Republic, my latest column was "a real head-scratcher." On the magazine's blog, he refutes what he believes I argued -- that "the Supreme Court should ban racial preferences because it's what the majority of Americans want."
He concludes that "if any judicial philosophy qualifies as...
To Josh Patashnik of The New Republic, my latest column...
May 6, 2009
The following story originally appeared in the September 2005 issue of The Atlantic during another time of flux for the Supreme Court.
I've been working on some questions in case the makers of Trivial Pursuit ever decide to put forth a Supreme Court edition: Now that Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her retirement, how many remaining justices have ever held elected office? How many have...
May 1, 2009
Editor's Note: I have been persuaded that I was unfair to Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who is widely seen as a possible Supreme Court nominee, in this article posted on May 1. I regret calling her "exceptionally controversial," which was an overstatement. I also regret citing anonymous claims that she has been "masquerading as a moderate," which I do not know to be true. -- Stuart...
April 18, 2009
Harold Hongju Koh is a tweedy, brainy legal scholar who writes brilliant law-review articles that are carefully reasoned, if more or less impenetrable to non-lawyers. He will likely be confirmed by the Senate as the top legal adviser to the State Department, and he should be. But his rather abstruse views on what he calls "transnational jurisprudence" deserve a close look because-taken...
April 11, 2009
Before 9/11, judges had no power to entertain writs of habeas corpus (petitions for release) by enemy fighters taken into custody by U.S. forces overseas.
Justice Robert Jackson spelled out this rule in a landmark 1950 decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager: "We are cited to no instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ [of habeas corpus] is known, has issued it on behalf...
July 12, 2008
At the Supreme Court, the right-wingers are always up to no good, and almost always in charge. Or so it seems to the sizable slice of the journalistic-academic-cosmopolitan world typified by The New York Times' editorial page.
A new wrinkle in this summer's assessments is that the conservative cabal appears to have co-opted liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens....
April 12, 2008
Among the legal issues over which the Bush administration and its congressional critics are stalemated in the war on terrorism is the so-called state secrets privilege. The case of one Khaled el-Masri illustrates the need for carefully balanced congressional reforms during the next administration to mitigate the privilege's harsh effects on deserving plaintiffs-and on the national image.
In a...
March 29, 2008
It's not every case in which the Bush administration is aligned with the World Court, human-rights groups, the American Bar Association, the European Union, other death-penalty opponents, and a vicious murderer now sitting on death row against Bush's home state of Texas and tough-on-crime groups.
Nor is it every case in which Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and his four most...
March 22, 2008
The six Guantanamo prisoners charged with participating in the 9/11 mass murders are "poster children for the death penalty," Attorney General Michael Mukasey told students in response to a question after a March 14 speech at the London School of Economics. True.
But Mukasey added a postscript: "In a way, I kind of hope from a personal standpoint -- and I can say this because the...
January 5, 2008
Sometimes it is more important to avoid looking like a bunch of political partisans than it is to reach the most legally sound result.
That was true in the case of Bush v. Gore. The U.S. Supreme Court decision ending the 2000 election litigation and handing the presidency to George W. Bush was legally defensible. But the 5-4 conservative-liberal split -- plus a sloppily written majority opinion...
November 3, 2007
The surge of Democratic opposition to President Bush's nomination of former Judge Michael Mukasey to be attorney general says a lot about certain Democrats, especially after the initial bipartisan applause for a superbly qualified man who has clearly repudiated Bush's previous claims of near-dictatorial powers.
It is especially telling that the main congressional objection to Mukasey has been his...
September 29, 2007
In the matter of the Holocaust-denying, terrorism-sponsoring, nuke-seeking, wipe-Israel-off-the-map-threatening, we-got-no-gays-in-Iran-spouting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his September 24 showcase speech at Columbia University: It would be easier to stomach the free-speech grandstanding of Lee Bollinger, Columbia's president and Ahmadinejad's histrionically hostile host, and others of Bollinger's...
June 16, 2007
A federal Appeals Court's unanimous rejection on June 11 of President Bush's effort to deny judicial review and due process to a legal alien who has been militarily incarcerated for four years -- because Bush says he is a Qaeda agent -- was a ringing and welcome defense of our constitutional freedoms.
But I worry that two of the three judges may have gone too far, or exposed a gap in our laws...
February 24, 2007
A front-page, February 20 federal appeals court decision moved another big "enemy combatant" case down the road toward an eventual Supreme Court decision, probably in June 2008. But the outcome, like the current situation, will be unsatisfactory no matter how the justices rule.
This problem is one that only Congress can solve: how to handle appeals by foreigners who are detained...
February 10, 2007
The spectacle of former CEOs Bernard Ebbers and Jeffrey Skilling getting sent to prison for 25 and 24 years, respectively, reminded me a bit of Roman emperors throwing criminals to the lions and bears to gratify circus crowds. Yes, Ebbers and Skilling are world-class crooks. The first helped inflate WorldCom's profits by billions of dollars. The second presided over the multiple frauds that...
February 6, 2006
James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked...
January 14, 2006
"Judge Alito, in 1985, you wrote that the Constitution -- these are your words -- 'does not protect a right to an abortion.' You said [today] that those words accurately reflected your view at the time. Now let me ask you: Do they accurately reflect your view today? ... Why can't you answer the question?" - Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
"Because ... the issue of abortion has to...
November 19, 2005
Those seeking to paint Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. as a scary, back-alley-abortion-promoting, patriarchy-pushing, theocracy-loving, civil-rights-hating, machine-gun-legalizing, right-wing extremist got a little ammunition this week. But not much.
November 5, 2005
Liberal critics and many media outlets have spewed tons of misleading stuff about Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., particularly about his supposed views on abortion and about the significance of two Sandra Day O'Connor opinions disagreeing with prior Alito opinions. So here's some straight stuff.
July 30, 2005
Do you believe that either the United States Congress or the states can regulate the sexual behavior of individuals within the privacy of their home?
July 23, 2005
Judge John G. Roberts Jr. will "strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench," President Bush said Tuesday night in announcing his Supreme Court nominee. "Strict constructionist" was on the lips of many Bush-Roberts supporters confident that Roberts is no "judicial activist."
July 11, 2005
For an old ranching girl, you turned out pretty good," President George W. Bush told Sandra Day O'Connor when she spoke to the White House last week to say that she was retiring from the Supreme Court. The image of O'Connor as cowgirl is a powerful one, and she has done as much as anyone to foster it. In her chambers, decorated with Western rugs and paintings and artifacts, she served her...
July 9, 2005
The president's favorite judge had scornfully denounced as "illegitimate" dozens of the "most significant constitutional decisions of the past three decades," as well as others going back to the 1920s. He had excoriated "the modern, activist, liberal Supreme Court" for rulings that recognized rights to abortion, contraception, and other aspects of the "right to...
July 2, 2005
On June 27, as the Supreme Court ended its term amid rampant speculation about 80-year-old Chief Justice William Rehnquist's future, his 75-year-old colleague Sandra Day O'Connor was continuing to inch away from her "conservative" past.
April 2, 2005
Right-to-life conservatives and right-to-die liberals have about exhausted their rhetorical arsenals, with the former calling the latter secularist killers and the latter calling the former hypocrites, theocrats, and (gasp) tramplers of states' rights. Meanwhile, many in the media who gleefully trumpeted how Terri Schiavo's case had turned rule-of-law conservatives against right-to-lifers have...
March 19, 2005
The constitutional argument advanced by Senate Republican supporters of the so-called "nuclear option" to end Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees -- which is that any nominee who has majority support must be confirmed -- is weak.
January 22, 2005
The birthing process was protracted, ugly, and unprincipled. But the baby doesn't look as bad as expected. And it may do OK unless it's strangled in its crib by Congress or abused by the judiciary.
November 20, 2004
A lot of liberals, and a lot of conservatives, think that President Bush is speaking in code when he says he would nominate to the Supreme Court "strict constructionists" who would "faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench."
September 6, 2003
When the first President Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, many conservatives complained that it was a "quota bill," as Bush had said of an earlier draft. Congressional Democrats and liberal groups hoped that the legislation would, among other things, help provide access for racial minorities and women to job markets that had been traditionally dominated by white males.
July 7, 2003
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor got her job through affirmative action. It was obvious to officials in the Reagan Justice Department, as they searched for a Supreme Court justice in the summer of 1981, that she lacked the usual qualifications for the high court. "No way," Emma Jordan, an assistant to the then Attorney General William French Smith, recalls thinking. "There were gaps in...
July 5, 2003
Republican presidents have picked seven of the nine current Supreme Court justices. But as the Court demonstrated so dramatically last month by blessing both gay rights and racial preferences, the result has been nothing like the "conservative Supreme Court" the media often depicts.
October 12, 2002
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is fond of quoting a maxim of Cicero's: Inter arma silent leges ("In time of war, the laws are silent"). At least, he said in a speech two years ago, "they speak with a muted voice."
July 8, 2002
The federal court decision declaring the "under God" phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional caused an uproar. But it may also provide a window into a larger contempt for the judiciary that seems to be taking hold in George W. Bush's Washington. The stormy legal battle after the 2000 presidential election, and the ever-nastier fights over nominations to the federal bench,...
July 6, 2002
"Why should I be made to feel like an outsider?" asked Mike Newdow, the California atheist who got two judges to declare the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, as he explained his litigious urges to The New York Times. After he's finished stripping "under God" out of the Pledge, he hopes to rip "In God We Trust" off of our money. And he is itching to do something...
April 20, 2002
Justice Byron R. White's former law clerks remember him not as one of his generation's greatest football players, but as one of its sharpest legal minds. He was, some say, the smartest person they ever met. Yet in 31 years on the Supreme Court, the most gifted scholar-athlete of his time made far less conspicuous a mark on the law than colleagues with far less potent intellects. One reason was...
February 9, 2002
Teachers in Michigan's public schools are prohibited by law from patting students on the back, lest someone shout "sexual harassment." But it is almost impossible to get an incompetent teacher, or a disruptive child, out of the classroom anywhere in the country. Bristol, Conn., like other towns, has removed the seesaws and merry-go-rounds from its playgrounds. Some kids find the new,...
November 18, 2000
"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of our greatest judges. A Kennedy Administration lawyer offered that quote a long time ago to square the language of the U.N. Charter with the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba in 1962. In the charter, the United States had undertaken a solemn obligation to renounce...
October 14, 2000
At the core of American freedom, wrote the late, great Justice William J. Brennan Jr. in 1964 in New York Times Co. vs. Sullivan, is "a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."...
July 13, 2000
MARGARET WARNER: Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court term ended with a burst of decisions on hot-button issues ranging from abortion to school prayer to whether the Boy Scouts could expel a gay scoutmaster. The fact that many of these cases were decided by a 5-4 vote prompted a flood of articles and editorials on how the outcome of this year's presidential race could alter the balance on the court....
April 10, 2000
It has become a familiar pattern. When the Supreme Court ruled last week that cities and states can ban nude dancing in clubs, the vote was close (6-3), and the conservatives won. And when the Supreme Court knocked down the White House's hard-nosed efforts to regulate the tobacco industry last month, the justices were even more closely divided (5-4) - conservatives against liberals. In recent...
August 30, 1999
The most important cocaine question for George W. Bush is this: would you seek long prison terms for today's 18-year-olds for doing what you say you may or may not have done as a young man--and when you now suggest that whatever you did was a mere youthful indiscretion, and thus irrelevant to your candidacy?
Countless thousands of people are rotting in prisons all across America--many in Texas...
January 13, 1999
MARGARET WARNER: Stuart, what else do we need to know about this man that you think will affect how we conduct this trial?
STUART TAYLOR: Well, you cover it pretty well. I think the top of it is - he's a very smart man - he's no nonsense - as Jeff recently wrote in the New Yorker. He runs a poker game that includes some interesting players, and the idea is let's play the poker, no nonsense. The...
July 24, 1997
JIM LEHRER: Retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. He died today at the age of 91. Joshua Rosenkrantz clerked for Justice Brennan. He's now the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law. Douglas Kmiec was an assistant attorney general during the Reagan administration; he now teaches law at the University of Notre Dame. And NewsHour regular...
January 13, 1997
About 3 a.m. one night last April, after reading the two federal appellate decisions creating a new right to assisted suicide, and being pulled one way by concerns about judicial imperialism, and the other way by heart-rending anecdotes of people dying in excruciating pain-or blowing their brains out or jumping off bridges-because they lacked the more humane option of lethal medication, I settled...
November 25, 1996
When Robert Bork agrees with Laurence Tribe, and with just about every other law professor and mainstream economist in the land, and with President Bill Clinton; and when the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is in sync with those of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and when they are all united against something, it's awfully tempting to be for it.
The push for a balanced...
October 12, 1996
While you would hardly know it from the tenor of the campaign, this year's presidential election could have a far more dramatic impact than most on the political-philosophical orientation of the Supreme Court, and thus on the direction of constitutional law.
That's because the Court is now so closely divided on such vital Issues that the replacement of one of the conservative justices with a...
April 15, 1996
As I started to read the recent rulings of two U.S. Courts of Appeals discovering that terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to kill themselves with lethal drugs prescribed by any willing physician, I was reminded of Judge Learned Hand's line about "Platonic Guardians."
I looked it up: "Each one of us must in the end choose for himself how far he would like to leave...
October 2, 1995
"Conservatives on Supreme Court Dominated Rulings of Latest Term." "High Court Rulings Hint Move to Right." "The Year the Court Turned to the Right." "The Conservative Majority Solidifies."
If these remind you of the headlines you were reading about three months ago, think again. They were actually taken from end-of-term wrapup pieces in The New York Times...
April 6, 1994
ROBERT MACNEIL: To assess Supreme Court Justice Blackmun's legacy, we're joined by four court watchers. Kathleen Sullivan is a professor of law at Stanford University. Charles Fried was solicitor general during the Reagan administration and now teaches at Harvard. Stuart Taylor covers the Supreme Court for American Lawyer Magazine and is a frequent court analyst for The NewsHour, and Harold...
May 17, 1993
Starting in 1981, the Reagan administration adopted the civil-rights agenda of the Republican right wing. It was a cheap way to appease a key constituency. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was put under William Bradford Reynolds, whose policies were skewed by preoccupation with the threat of quotas and reverse discrimination against white males: He adopted a tone of self-righteous...
February 8, 1993
Justice Thurgood Marshall was sitting in his chambers, spinning yarns.
The night before, he had been watching former President Jimmy Carter's speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention on TV. "I said to my wife, 'Babe, he sure looks old,'" Marshall (then 80) recalled with a puckish grin. "And she said, 'Have you looked in the mirror lately?'
"Every once in a while...
May 18, 1992
"The grand jury . . . historically has been regarded as a primary security to the innocent against hasty, malicious and oppressive prosecution; it serves the invaluable function in our society of standing between the accuser and the accused."
Hogwash.
There was not much left of the grand jury's role as a check on prosecutors when Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote these words 30 years ago...
April 20, 1992
Judge Malcolm Wilkey, Retired
Special Counsel
c/o Attorney General William Barr
Department of Justice
Washington. D.C. 20530
Dear Judge Wilkey:
I have appointed myself "Special Journalist" to investigate your investigation into whether any crimes were committed by members of the House of Representatives in connection with the so-called House Bank.
This is your formal notice of...
January 6, 1992
The craft of lawyering often calls for peering into the future-foretelling how new laws will be construed, how constitutional doctrine will evolve, what practice areas will be hot or cold. And a new year beckons, pristine as new fallen snow.
So step right up and take the 1992 legal prognostication quiz. Test your skills. Compete for coveted awards. (First prize: a 30-minute videotape of Moira...
December 2, 1991
In reversing the convictions of three once-powerful Reagan administration officials-Lyn Nofziger, Oliver North, and, last month, John Poindexter-the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has consistently cleaved along straight party lines.
Each of the eight Reagan-appointed and Bush-appointed judges (including now-Justice Clarence Thomas) has voted to reverse each of the convictions that he...
July 22, 1991
The central vice of liberal judicial activism, conservative theorists have long contended, has been unwarranted interference with the rights of the people to make the laws through their elected representatives.
Now that Reagan and Bush appointees are firmly in command of the Supreme Court, will they practice the deference to elected representatives that their sponsors preach?
Perhaps. But the...
December 17, 1990
"In some unknown number of cases the Court's rule will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him, to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him. As a consequence, there will not be a gain, but a loss, in human dignity."
Those were Justice Byron White's words in 1966, in a forceful dissent from the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in...
November 5, 1990
"There are some things that happened at the trial that I find very bothersome," Judge Thomas Meskill observed during the Oct. 23 oral arguments in the appeals of E. Robert Wallach and two co-defendants.
"Bothersome'' is putting it mildly.
The closer the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit-looks, the more likely it is to throw the case out as a...
March 25, 1990
WASHINGTON — If recent history is any guide, by June the Supreme Court justices will be sour, sullen and snarling at each other in their opinions.
Last summer, Justice Antonin Scalia called Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's position in an abortion case "irrational," "perverse," "indecisive" and so fatuous it "cannot be taken seriously." And they were...
October 2, 1989
Like most Americans, Lewis Powell Jr. had never given much thought to the death penalty.
Then, in 1972, he joined the Supreme Court. Since then Justice Powell, who retired in June 1987 at the age of 79, has thought about it quite a bit.
He has adhered to his view that nothing in the Constitution bars governments from putting vicious murderers to death. But he has pondered what happens after all...
September 11, 1988
CHIEF JUSTICE WILLIAM HUBBS REHNQUIST stared stonily out at the crowd in the marble-columned chamber from the Supreme Court's center chair, the chair in which Ronald Reagan had put him two years before. It was June 29, the last day of the Court's 1987-88 term, and one decision remained to be handed down - the big one.
"Number 87-1279," the Chief Justice began. Methodically, he...
January 6, 1986
An activist jurisprudence, one which anchors the Constitution only in the consciences of jurists, is a chameleon jurisprudence, changing color and form in each era.
The Constitution... is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably...
