Don't Blame the Court

...This is change...

...In fact, the complaints bring forth memories of the New Deal, when liberals were accustomed to throwing up their hands at the Court’s determination to thwart any progressive reform...

...political and social change is through What liberal wants his liberation by politics and society, no less than judicial fiat...

...If large corporations-all hoped that the leafleting and letter-writing can stop judiciary would preempt policies that, abortions, they can also start them because of their popular support, had again...

...no has stopped the popular will from matter how impressive a majority being heeded in the legislatures, so reformers might pile up, the Court that only the courts can get the was always free to countermand the country moving in the right direction...

...But women, feminists, and Through most of American his- liberals all have votes already...

...What’s more, the Court is a strange rock for liberals, supposedly committed to the people’s sovereignty and to democratic decisionmaking, to lean on for salvation...

...people’s verdict...

...But there’s an important difference between these times and those...

...After outlawing hiring criteria that tended to exclude blacks and women, the Burger Court moved toward ruling out only specifically intentional discrimination...

...It protected people accused of committing crimes from overbearing or unscrupulous police...

...Like many liberal attacks on RighttoLifers, though, this one is uncomfortably reminiscent of conservative In a Liberal Direction attacks on antiwar protests a few Today, the situation is radically years back...

...It overruled attempts to stamp out civil rights and antiwar protests...

...There was usually no re- example-a vocal passionate minority course from the Court’s decision...

...gotten legislative backing...

...This is a fairly recent development...

...For three years the Court had been overturning major New Deal programsthe National Recovery Act, laws establishing moratoriums on debts and permitting cities to declare bankruptcy, the New York Minimum Wage Law for Women...

...Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert Jackson (later a Supreme Court justice himself), expressed the tenor of the times when he wrote that “never in its entire history can the Supreme Court be said to have for a single hour been representative of anything except the relatively conservative forces of its day...

...Court’s sense of justice fail are in a strange position...

...Why is it that today’s the legislative process...

...schools...

...The fact is that the Burger Court hasn’t been a major factor in obstructing social change-at most, it has refused to push change forward...

...The Court ordered the states to desegregate their schools, Seth Kupferberg is a second-year student at Harvard Law School...

...That’s why So far, all the Burger Court has popular leaders from Jefferson to done is to refuse to find the political Roosevelt attacked Supreme Courts meanings in the laws and the Constithat overruled laws and resisted tution that liberals see in them...

...After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Court became the chief guardian of the rights of women...

...Instead of people liberals love to raise the cudgel moaning about a hostile Supreme against: small groups that feared the court, they should be politickmg to people’s will...

...As Nixon promised, a change soon became apparent in the Court’s decisions...

...To listen to the protests, including some from dissenting holdover Justices, each one all but doomed the Constitution...

...past generations of Americ in liberals The Constitution is invoked by used to fervently hope for, because liberals, seeking social change, in an they felt secure in their ability to attempt to render politics un- persuade the people and thus control necessary...

...and beliefs should be considered, not Thus, liberals who are outraged their importance to those who hold when their appeals to the Supreme them...

...In the fifties and sixties, the Supreme Court usually took the side of the class of people one pioneering Court asphion called “the poor, the ignorant, the numerically weak, the friendless, and the powerless~~-those who had customarily been shut off from society’s benefits...

...Civil rights groups, feminist organizations, anti-poverty activists-all the people who only recently looked on the Supreme Court as the protector of their interests-now regard it as a blockade in the path to needed social change...

...Today’s liberals democrats, believers in increased ought to feel the same security...

...Liberal law professors somenine unelected men responsible to times cite the abortion issue as a good nobody...

...It helped preserve the natural environment and people’s privacy...

...The last great wave of protest against a conservative Supreme Court crested with Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt in 1937 to increase its size...

...TO say tence on doing that...

...Most of these pre-1970 quarrels with the Supreme Court sprang from the frustration people felt after Seeing One answer sometimes given is that laws go through Congress or state ordinary political processes can get legislatures and then be invalidated by stuck...

...All this began to change when Richard Nixon appointed three Associate Justices and a Chief Justice to the Court...

...They equality and greater civil liberties, should remember that the way to want to bypass democratic means...

...through the courts...

...Instead of insisting that disadvantaged voting districts have the same rights as privileged ones, the Burger Court said states could give more money to rich school districts than to poor ones...

...No wonder the American Federation of Labor developed an antipathy to courts so strong that it opposed any ongoing government interference with employment until well into the New Deal...

...Lincoln, in his First Inaugural, said that if Supreme Court decisions were immune to challenge, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers...

...It let local communities outlaw movies they considered obscene...

...The Court said suburbs didn’t have to kelp cities integrate their schools...

...It cut back on protections for accused people and for workers who observe a Saturday Sabbath, and it restricted union leafleted access to public places...

...they tory, the Supreme Court has been the aen’t beaten UP for organizing, or protector of precisely the kind of lynched for holding rallies...

...They are implying True, there are cases where politics that an appointed, elite body-rather gets stuck and the courts have to step than the popularly chosen Conaess in...

...Each Burger Court decision has provoked a liberal outcry greater than the last...

...Nixon had promised during the 1968 campaign to change the Court’s makeup: he wanted “strict constructionists,” not liberal activists...

...In the 1890s the Supreme Court set off another onslaught of complaints when it declared that federal income taxes were unconstitutional...

...Then, too, an emotional, different...

...the kind of behavior by the Court that Now, all of that has been reversed...

...What liberals now that this means the protests were a seem to want is a Supreme Court that distortion of democracy would be to will, in effect, legislate-as long as it say that only a head count of feelings legislates in a liberal direction...

...Andrew Jackson denounced the Court when it declared the Bank of the United States constitutional, and he refused to abide by a decision protecting Indians’ rights...

...Most of the Burger Court’s single-minded, and uncivil minority illiberal decisions have involved a helped stop something that at first refusal to overturn laws, not an insis- had most Americans’ support...

...It dashed liberal hopes by ruling that capital punishment is not inherently cruel or unusual...

...It also restricted laws designed to curb the power of large corporations-for example, it modified state laws that let commissions establish utility rates and overturned minimum-wage, childlabor, and maximum-hour laws...

...helping to spark one of the great changes of American history...

...42 Dispossessed and Discon tented From the beginning, the Supreme Court has been unpopular with the dispossessed and discontented...

...Slaveholders, creditors, get a friendly Congress elected...

...And by imposing the onemanone-vote rule, the Court brought about reapportionment that gave more clout to racial minorities, poor people, and the working class...

...And the Court limited antitrust laws’ application to big business, using them instead to outlaw strikes by fledgling labor unions...

...Most recently, the Court ruled that the government isn’t required to pay for abortions-just the kind of situation, in which poor people are effectively deprived of a nominal right, that might have struck the Warren Court as a denial of equal protection of the law...

...It would’ve been a bad joke to tell and President, or the states’ governors disenfranchised Southern blacks to get and legislatures-is the proper avenue their legislatures to abolish segregated of reform...