Marshall 1987 The Constitution: A Living Document

Summary

2023-09-20: Marshall The Constitution: A Living Document 1987

• This year marks the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution. (915)
• The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the "more perfect Union" it is said we now enjoy. (915)
• To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. (916)
• We the People. When the Founding Fathers used this phrase in 1787, they did not have in mind the majority of America's citizens. (916) [women, slaves, native americans, others?]
• ... Chief Justice Taney penned the following passage in the Dred Scott case, ... [slaves] We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included .... (918)
• While the Union survived the Civil War, the Constitution did not. In its place arose a new, more promising basis for justice and equality, the 14th Amendment, ensuring protection of the life, liberty, and property of all persons against deprivations without due process, and guaranteeing equal protection of the laws. (918)
• And yet almost another century would pass before any significant recognition was obtained of the rights of Black Americans to share equally even in such basic opportunities as education, housing and employment, and to have their votes counted, and counted equally. (918) [recidivism of ShelbyCounty-Holder (2013) and Allen, Alabama Secretary of State, et al. v. Milligan et al. (2023) ]
• What is striking is the role legal principles have played throughout America's history in determining the condition of Negroes. They were enslaved by law, emancipated by law, disenfranchised and segregated by law; and, finally, they have begun to win equality by law. (919)
• Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. (919)
• The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendent of an African slave. (919) [Originalism, in one sense, refuted by Amendment]
• We will see that the true miracle was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making, and a life embodying much good fortune that was not. (919)
• I plan to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution as a living document, including the Bill of Rights and the other amendments protecting individual freedoms and human rights. (920)