A Prologue on Constitutional
History
Trumbull, Presentation of the Declaration of
Independence
John Marshall (CJ 1801-35)
Old Supreme Court Chamber (1819-1860)
Roger Taney (CJ 1836-64)
Old Senate Chamber (Supreme Court Chamber
1860-1935)
Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)
Salmon Chase (CJ 1864-73)
Morrison Waite (CJ 1874-88)
Melville Fuller (CJ 1888-1910)
Edward D. White (CJ 1910-21)
William Howard Taft (CJ 1921-30)
Charles Evans Hughes (CJ 1930-41)
Supreme Court Building (1935-present)
Supreme Court Chamber (1935-present)
Franklin D. Roosevelt (President 1933-45)
The Court Packing Plan 1937
Harlan Fiske Stone (CJ 1941-46)
Fred Vinson (CJ 1946-53)
Earl Warren (CJ 1953-69)
The Warren Court (1966)
Warren E. Burger (CJ 1969-86)
The Burger Court (1971)
William Rehnquist (CJ 1986-2005)
The Rehnquist Court (1995)
John Roberts (CJ 2005-
)
The Roberts Court (2007)
An Introduction to Constitutional
Decisionmaking
The Fourteenth Amendment
United States Senate (1868)
Homer Plessy (1863-1925)
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950)
Lloyd Gaines (1913 - ?)
Thurgood Marshall (1908-93)
Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1924-95)
Heman Sweatt (1912-82)
Brown v. Board of Educ. (1954)
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)
Enumerated Federal Power, Reserved State
Authority: Introduction
The Commerce Clause
ART. I, Sec. 8: “The Congress shall have
the power . . . [t]o regulate commerce . . .
among the several States . . .”
Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)
US v. E.C. Knight (1895)
Champion v. Ames (1903)
Swift & Co. v. US (1905)
Shreveport Rate Case (1914)
Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918)
Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad (1935)
Schechter Poultry (1935)
Carter v. Carter Coal Co. (1936)
Court Packing Plan (1937)
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937)
NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937)
US v. Darby (1941)
Roscoe Filburn- Wickard v. Filburn (1942)
Heart of Atlanta Motel v. US (1964)
Katzenbach v. McClung (1964)
Perez v. US (1971)
Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Ass’n (1981)
US v. Lopez (1995)
Gonzalez v. Raich (2005)
Congressional Authority to Enforce
Civil Rights
Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
Thirteenth Amendment passes House (1865)
Reconstruction Amendments
Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
Enforcement Provisions
Amendment 13, Sec. 2, Amendment 15,
Sec. 2: “Congress shall have power to
enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.”
Amendment 14, Sec. 5: “Congress shall
have power, by appropriate legislation, to
enforce the provisions of this article.”
Civil Rights Act of 1875
Joseph P. Bradley (1813-92)
Voting Rights Act of 1965
Earl Warren (1891-1974)
William J. Brennan, Jr. (1906-97)
Thurgood Marshall (1908-93)
City of Boerne v. Flores (1997)
Anthony Kennedy (1936-
)
Article 3, Section 2 (1787)
“The judicial power shall extend . . . to Controversies between two or
more States; -- between a State and Citizens of another State; -between Citizens of different States; -- . . . and between a State, or
the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.”
Eleventh Amendment (1798)
“The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to
extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted
against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by
Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.”
Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)
Family and Medical Leave Act (1993)
Violence Against Women Act (1994)
The Taxing Power and the
Spending Power
ART. I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have
power to lay and collect taxes, . . . to pay
the Debts and provide for the common
Defence and general Welfare of the United
States.”
McCray v. US (oleomargarine)(1904)
US v. Doremus (opium)(1919)
Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. (1922)
US v. Kahriger (bookies) (1953)
US v. Butler (1936)
Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (1937)
South Dakota v. Dole (1987)
The Treaty Power
ART. II, Section 2: The President “shall
have the Power, by and with the Advice
and Consent of the Senate, to make
Treaties, provided two thirds of the
Senators present concur.”
Missouri v. Holland (1920)
Tenth Amendment (1791)
“The powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively, or to the people.”
W. Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor (Sept. 1962-Jan. 1969)
Maryland v. Wirtz (1968)
W.J. Usery, Jr., Secretary of Labor (Feb. 1976-Jan.1977)
National League of Cities v. Usery (1976)
Hodel v. Virginia Surface Mining & Reclamation Ass’n (1981)
Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985)
National Commandeering
New York v. United States (1992)
Printz v. United States (1997)
The Dormant Commerce
Clause
Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)
Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia (1851)
Dean Milk Co. v. City of Madison (1951)
Hughes v. Oklahoma (1979)
City of Philadelphia v. New Jersey (1978)
C&A Carbone v. Town of Clarkstown (1994)
Granholm v. Heald (2005)
United Haulers Ass’n, Inc. v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste
Management Authority (2007)
Kassel v. Consolidated Freightways Corp. (1981)
Hughes v. Alexandria Scrap Corp. (1976)
West Lynn Creamery, Inc. v. Healy (1994)
Camps Newfound/Owatonna, Inc. v. Town of Harrison
(1997)
The Article IV Privileges and
Immunities Clause
Art. IV, Sec. 2, cl. 1: “The Citizens of each
State shall be entitled to all Privileges and
Immuniteis of Citizens in the several
States.”
Corfield v. Coryell (1823)
United Building & Construction Trades Council of Camden County v.
Mayor and Council of Camden (1984)
Separation of Powers
The Imperial Presidency
Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952)
Foreign Relations
US v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936)
US v. Belmont (1937)
War Powers Resolution (1973)
Dames & Moore v. Regan (1981)
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004)
Jay Bybee (1953-
)
Executive Privileges and
Immunities
US v. Nixon (1974)
Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977)
A. Ernest Fitzgerald
Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982)
Clinton v. Jones (1997)
Legislative Overreaching
» Delegation
» Legislative Veto
» Line-Item Veto
INS v. Chadha (1983)
Equal Protection
14th Amendment (1868): “No State shall . . .
deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.’
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)
Fletcher v. Peck (1810)
Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960)
Palmer v. Thompson (1971)
Washington v. Davis (1976)
Charles R. Lawrence, III
Shaw v. Reno
USDA v. Moreno (1973)
Bradwell v. Illinois (1873)
Pauli Murray
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Equal Rights Amendment
(submitted to states 1972)
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or
by any State on account of sex.”
Craig v. Boren (1976)
United States v. Virginia (1996)
Buck v. Bell (1927)
Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson (1942)
Lochner v. New York (1905)
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937)
Among the more egregious pre-Reynolds disparities (compiled by Congressman Morris K. Udall):
In the Connecticut General Assembly one House district had 191 people; another, 81,000 (424 times more).
In the New Hampshire General Court one township with three people had a Representative in the lower house; this was
the same representation given another district with 3,244. The vote of a resident of the first township was therefore
1,081 times more powerful at the Capitol.
In the Utah State Legislature the smallest district had 165 people, the largest 32,380 (196 times the population of the
other).
In the Vermont General Assembly the smallest district had 36 people, the largest 35,000, a ratio of almost 1,000 to 1.
Los Angeles County, California; with 6 million people, had one member in the California State Senate, as did the 14,000
people of one rural county (428 times more).
In the Idaho Legislature the smallest Senate district had 951 people; the largest, 93,400 (97 times more).
17 members of the Nevada Senate represented as many as 127,000 or as few as 568 people, a ratio of 224 to 1.
Reynolds v. Sims (1964)
Hanging Chad
Pregnant Chad
Dimpled Chad
Bush v. Gore (2000)
Jose and Lidia Lopez
Plyler v. Doe (1982)
Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
John Marshall Harlan II (1899-1971)
Estelle Griswold
William O. Douglas (1898-1980)
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE)
Robert Bork (1927 - )
The Ninth Amendment (1791)
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of
certain rights, shall not be construed to
deny or disparage others retained by the
people.”
Sarah Weddington (1945 - )
Roe v. Wade (1973)
Roe v. Wade (1973)
Sandra Day O’Connor (1930 - )
Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992)
Tyron Garner and John Geddes Lawrence
Lawrence v. Texas (2003)
Tyron Garner and John Geddes Lawrence
Lawrence v. Texas (2003)
Tyron Garner and John Geddes Lawrence
Lawrence v. Texas (2003)
Solicitor General Paul Clement
Gonzales v. Carhart (2007)