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Matt
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Every American criminal-trial judge asks the jury to mimic Descartes’s process of looking for certainty by testing the assertion of the defendant’s guilt against a standard almost as high as Descartes’s. The question for the jury is not
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“demonstrates a belief in popular sovereignty, something commonly held at the time of the U.S. Constitution’s adoption. This view of the legitimacy of government asserts that sovereignty did not reside in the federal or state governments, but ultimately in the people themselves.65 The people can delegate their sovereignty however they wish, either through enumerated powers (à la the federal government) or general powers (à la the states). They could also, presumably, delegate no powers to any government and live in complete anarchy.”
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
“George Mason’s Lockean natural rights guarantee continued to be popular. Versions of it specifying its various expansive protections of the rights to pursue happiness and acquire property had been adopted by seven states by 1818.72 Therefore, by the early nineteenth century state constitutional drafters had learned to do two things: protect rights broadly through fairly open-ended constitutional language, and exempt rights out of the powers that the people extend to state governments.”
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
“In later unenumerated rights cases the Supreme Court has, for whatever reason, shied away from Justice Goldberg’s suggestion. That has not prevented it from using tests looking to “traditions” and the like for “fundamental rights” worthy of its protection, such as in famous unenumerated rights cases like Roe v. Wade (abortion), Troxel v. Granville (parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children), or Lawrence v. Texas (right of same-sex intimate sexual conduct).59 But in none of those or related cases has it invoked the Ninth Amendment beyond, at best, a passing reference. Thus, Justice Goldberg’s undeveloped but interesting thoughts on the matter are the only more than transitory statements on the Ninth Amendment from the nation’s highest court.”
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
“Many factors concerning the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians depend on the Palestinian people, such as whether an alternative to Hamas will develop in the Gaza Strip or if the Palestinian Authority will evolve in a way that produces not only a renewed desire to negotiate final status, but also the ability to enforce an agreement.”
― Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World
― Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World
“For, read properly, the ninth amendment creates no rights at all. There are no “ninth amendment rights” in the sense in which there are, for example, first amendment rights or fourth amendment rights. That there are individual rights fully derivable from no single provision but implicit in several, or in the structure of the Bill of Rights as a whole, is a proposition implicit in the ninth amendment. But that amendment is not itself the fount of any such rights, and it in no way obviates the need to argue that the Constitution does indeed impose upon government the particular limitation for which the advocate contends.52 Thus the Ninth Amendment itself does not protect a right, but tells us not to not find a right in the Constitution just because it is not specifically enumerated. The right to privacy still needs some kind of constitutional hook, although that hook might be the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, even though the clause does not mention “privacy.” In interpreting that clause, and other clauses, we should be mindful of their more expansive interpretations.”
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
― Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters
Building 18 Book Club
— 8 members
— last activity Mar 28, 2022 11:11AM
Lunchtime book club in the vicinity of Microsoft Building 18
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