How The U.S. Supreme Court Butchered The Constitution

Posted: 4/21/2015

Trigger

Just read “15 Supreme Court Decisions that Shredded the Constitution When the Court traded law and liberty for political expediency”. This is a very recommendable article! Something like it has been on my mind for a long time. It should be recommended study for every high school student!

Unfortunately, the descriptions of each of the selected cases is very short and not easy to follow for a lay person in legal matters.

I do not have the time at the moment to do more research or provide more comments, but I have held for some time that the U.S. Supreme Court is the mightiest abettor and accomplice of big government.

Some Preliminary Remarks

The author excluded older, superseded decisions like the “infamous horrific” Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott, because according to the author’s judgment these do not represent “guiding precedent” anymore. I would strongly argue that this awfully wrong. These cases were trailblazers for what the U.S. Supreme Court could get away with without an outcry from the citizens of the U.S. These superseded cases still matter a lot.

Of course, the author omitted landmark cases, e..g. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) which is said to have ended the Lochner era (based on Lochner v. New York (1905)).

I disagree that the author ranked Kelo v. City of New London (2005) only as 13th. Given it’s far reaching implications, the author underestimated the significance of this decision perhaps because it is so new. However, Kelo is another very grave violation of private property rights of the citizens of the U.S.