The Supreme Court's Retreat From Reconstruction: A Distortion Of Constructional Jurisprudence (contributions In Legal Studies)

E-Book Overview

As the nation turned its back on Reconstruction, the Supreme Court in turn narrowed Thirteenth-, Fourteenth-, and Fifteenth-Amendment protections of former slaves, thus straying from the understanding of the amendments' framers. Tracking a long line of cases that employed narrow constructions of these amendments and accompanying statutes, this study compares the Court's propositions to the framers' own interpretations. The resulting portrait makes it clear that the Court contributed in a significant way to the nation's retreat from Reconstruction. Before analyzing the relevant cases, Scaturro provides a historical synopsis of the collapse of Reconstruction. The final section demonstrates how the twentieth-century Court handed down decisions that accommodated the demands of the Civil Rights Movement, but did so with constitutional interpretations that preserved several misunderstandings about the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the Fourteenth. This study helps to resolve a contemporary dilemma regarding the consequences of the Court's narrowing of the Interstate Commerce Clause. It also challenges long standing assumptions about the state action requirement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause. Besides being valuable to Supreme Court historians, the subject matter of this volume, which covers both constitutional law and legal history, will be of substantial interest to lawyers, judges, and political scientists, particularly in view of recent developments on the high Court. The lessons taught by this chapter of Supreme Court jurisprudence offer insight into constitutional interpretation in general, and the conclusion develops this idea by looking at the problematic interaction between law and outside historical influences.

E-Book Content

Page i  The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction   Page ii  Recent Titles in   Contributions in Legal Studies     Controversy, Courts, and Community: The Rhetoric of Judge Miles Welton Lord   Verna C. Corgan     Constitutional Politics in the States: Contemporary Controversies and Historical Patterns   G. Alan Tarr, editor     Law and the Great Plains: Essays on the Legal History of the Heartland   John R. Wunder, editor     Judicial Entrepreneurship: The Role of the Judge in the Marketplace of Ideas   Wayne V. McIntosh and Cynthia L. Cates     Solving the Puzzle of Interest Group Litigation   Andrew Jay Koshner     Presidential Defiance of “Unconstitutional” Laws: Reviving the Royal Prerogative   Christopher N. May     Promises on Prior Obligations at Common Law   Kevin M. Teeven     Litigating Federalism: The States Before the U.S. Supreme Court   Eric N. Waltenburg and Bill Swinford     Law and the Arts   Susan Tiefenbrun, editor     Contract Law and Morality   Henry Mather     The Appearance of Equality: Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court   Christopher M. Burke     Religion, Law, and the Land   Brian Edward Brown     Page iii  The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction   A Distortion of Constitutional Jurisprudence   Frank J. Scaturro   Contributions in Legal Studies, Number 91     GREENWOOD PRESS   Westport, Connecticut • London         Page iv  Library of Congress Cataloging­in­Publication Data   Scaturro, Frank J.               The Supreme Court’s retreat from Reconstruction : a distortion of constitutional jurisprudence / Frank J. Scaturro.               p. cm.—(Contributions in legal studies, 0147–1074 ; no. 91)         Includes bibliographical references and index.         ISBN 0–313–31105–6 (alk. paper)         1. Civil rights—United States—History—19th century. 2.   Constitutional history—United States. 3. United States—Politics   and government—1865–1900. 4. United States. Constitution.   13th–15th Amendments. I. Title. II. 
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