The Evolution of the U.S. Supreme Court

It has hardened into an extreme postal service of original object by which proponents claim that inbuilt questions aim to be settled only by recourse to the intentions of the Framers, as if the world had been frozen in time and of all timeything had to be well-tried in light of eighteenth-century values and ideas. A nonher way of categorizing the positions is original intent versus discriminative bringivism, which is the way conservatives see the matter. They believe that those espousing the essential values approach are legislating from the bench quite than deciding issues based on the legal philosophy and the Constitution. Wiecek traces this pass with history and indicates how it has ever so been part and parcel of the judicial change with reference to the Constitution especially. This really begins, as Wiecek notes, in the subject of Marbury v. Madison, the causal agency that established that the Supreme judicial system would conduct judicial review of constitutional issues. The decision itself has been seen as the first case of judicial activism as the Supreme Court took unto itself a labour not elucidated clearly in the Constitution. Having done this, the Supreme Court ever after was subject to the question of how the judges were to gather in decisions regarding constitutionality, and this evolved into the debate over whether the judges had to conform strictly to not just the Constitution provided also the original intent of the Framers or whether there w

ere ever higher interests involved and whether the Constitution can be verbalize to evolve with the country rather than remain an unchanging guidepost. Wiecek traces the cardinal strands of this argument through the history of the Supreme court and lay d take in how each has prevailed at one time or another, or at least has been perceived as prevailing, since it is not always clear on what basis the Court makes certain decisions. Wiecek states that the essentials of the debate over judicial review give centered on the question of legitimacy:

This concession availed the Japanese nothing at the time, but it anticipated the Court's attack on segregation in the 1950s (146).

All agree that judicial review, to be legitimate, essential consist of something more than judges simply imposing their own values, especially when they thwart the will of democratic majorities. Thus the act of judging must be physical object; that is, it must fail by criteria other than the judges' personal political, religious, and social beliefs. These external and objective criteria are bundled together in the concept of the rule of law (191).

Wiecek, William M. Liberty under Law: The Supreme Court in American Life. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

The second Red Scare faded to a poisoned memory as the Cold War abated. But its constitutional problems arising from America's foreign involvements and from the consequent growth of presidential power have not diminished in recent years (150).

In Chapter Seven, Wiecek addresses a constitutional issue raised in 1938 in a case that was otherwise of no importance but which had in a footnote an important concept that would draw vital in subsequent decisions. In this footnote, Justice cavity stated that judges should be less willing to claim a statute constitutional if it appears to be within a specific prohibition of the Constitution. He also stated that laws which fetter political processes which can ordinarily be expected to
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