Quote:
Originally Posted by epitome
Interesting. I knew the Federalist Papers were anonymous and a precursor to our rights today, but didn't know they are the baseline that the Supreme Court uses.
|
Quotations from the Federalist Papers are frequent and abundant in the decisions of the Supreme Court. I looked for a fast example in the cases that I set out on my site, and the first to come up is the Burger-Rhenquist dissent in Schad:
http://www.xxxlaw.com/cases/schad-ephraim.html
When you think about it, it should not be any surprise that they are influential to the courts in understanding the Constitution. They were written with the motive of influencing the states to ratify the Constitution and were written by the leading intellectual lights of the revolutionary generation, people who had a hand in banging out the Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia - at a time long before otherwise intelligent people started to argue about who made the best cheese steak sandwich in that town.
__________________
Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964