The main field of my study concerns the role of the Supreme Court in American legal and political system. My research frequently focuses on the case law, especially on some of the most important cases in the Court’s history, and on their influence on the whole of political, economic, and social relations of the country. I personally believe that American federal judges – among whom the most influential are the Justices of the Supreme Court – have gained more power than the Framers of the Constitution agreed to give them. Such situation occurred mostly because of the creation of the power of judicial review by the Supreme Court, which allowed the judiciary to determine the contitutionality of acts created by the other branches of government.
There is no doubt that the United States were not created as a purely democratic state. On the one hand, it established basic rules and principles of democratic government such as free elections, sovereignty of the nation, fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals or independent judiciary. All of these principles were, however, enjoyed only by the part of American society: free elections were guaranteed for white men, excluding women and blacks; sovereignty belonged to the nation, i.e. white women and men, because slaves were not considered citizens; fundamental rights and freedoms were guaranteed only for whites; institutional independence of the judicial branch did not prevent the system from injustice towards the blacks. Furthermore, one of the most important values of democratic society, equal protection of law, was absent in the original constitutional document of 1787, as well as the provisions of Bill of Rights. The clause became part of U.S. constitutional reality yet in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted, as a direct result of social and political changes caused by the civil war. After introducing the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery, the government took a step forward by making all citizens equal in 1868 and by providing black Americans with suffrage rights in 1870. For former slaves it meant a milestone step in their fight to destroy the social and political boundaries which limited their basic rights and freedoms. However, before the above mentioned events took place, the period of injustice and exploitation occurred with the U.S. Supreme Court in the middle of social and political tensions. The main purpose of the article is to show the changing attitude of the U.S. Supreme Court with regard to the social and political status of African‑Americans. This attitude influenced historical and contemporary social relations among the American society proving one of the most controversial aspects of U.S. democracy.
This article examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s lesser-known educative role as an egalitarian institution within a broader deliberative democratic process. Scholars have argued that the Court’s long asserted power of judicial review, especially in the equal protection and civil rights context, has been an over-reach of the judicial branch’s constitutional authority and responsibilities. Normative and empirical critiques have been centered on the aims of judicial review, and the challenges it poses in American political life. A core issue surrounding these critiques is that Justices are appointed not elected, and thus undermine the principle of majority rule in the U.S. constitutional democratic order. Although these critiques are legitimate in terms of claims about unelected Supreme Court Justices’ seemingly discretionary powers over elected legislative bodies, and the uncertain policy implications of judicial pronouncements on the broader society, there is, nevertheless, a positive application of judicial review as a tool Justices use as part of their educative role overcoming the so-called “counter-majoritarian difficulty.” Through a close reading of oral arguments in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) and San Antonio vs. Rodriguez (1973)-two landmark cases invoking the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution-the article shows how appointed Justices adjudicate individual cases on appeal and attempt to educate (through an argumentative, reason-based and question-centered process) citizenlitigants and their legal representatives about the importance of equality, fairness and ethical responsibility even prior to rendering final decisions on policy controversies that have broader national social, political and economic implications.
The original text of the Constitution of the United States of America, written over 200 years ago, constitutes the supreme source of law in the American legal system. The seven articles and twenty seven amendments dictate understanding of fundamental principles of the federation’s functioning and its citizens’ rights. The paper aims to present the evolution of the U.S. Constitution’s language interpretation as provided by its final interpreter - the Supreme Court of the United States. Example of the Second Amendment will be analyzed to present the change in understanding of the language grammar and, as a consequence, the sense of the right to keep and bear arms in the light of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of District of Columbia v Heller (554 U.S. 570 (2008)). It will argue for the accuracy of statement of Charles Evans Hughes, former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court: “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is...”
For over one-hundred and fifty years, the United States Supreme Court has been the most powerful judicial body in the world with life-tenured judges consistently invalidating state and federal laws without clear support in constitutional text or history. This paper focuses on what should be the appropriate role of life-tenured, unelected federal judges in the American system of separation of powers. The tension is between wanting judges to enforce the supreme law of the Constitution while at the same time keeping judges within their assigned roles of enforcing not making the law. Much of constitutional scholarship in the United States is devoted to resolving this tension. This article argues that the Court should take a set back and defer more to elected leaders and voters. Although structural reform might help, most needed changes would require a constitutional amendment and are therefore unlikely to occur. The Justices should take it upon themselves to act with more humility and modesty and only overturn laws where there is strong evidence of clear constitutional error.
The article aims at analyzing legal and political sources, as well as consequences of the current confl ict between President Barack Obama and Republican Senators over the vacancy in the Supreme Court after the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. The Republican Party fears that the nomination made by Democratic president will shift the Court to the left, which, considering active judicial review by the Court, will have a crucial meaning for social, political and economic relations in the country. The article defi nes legal and political relations between the executive and legislative departments in the context of Supreme Court appointments, leading to fi ndings concerning possible solution to the confl ict and facing the problem of politicization of constitutional courts.
The principle of stare decisis in United States courts appears in two aspects – the courts of lower jurisdiction are bound by the rulings issued by the courts of higher jurisdictions and as a horizontal binding of the Supreme Court by its own rulings. The latter ‘binding’ is not as strong as the former one, which is reflected in the Supreme Court judges’ opinions and actions, which consist in both overruling their own precedents and highlighting the need for maintaining them. The changes of the Justices’ attitudes leads to a negative answer to the question whether precedent – which is binding only when the Supreme Court’s justices want it to be to be so – is binding precedent at all.
PL
Formuła stare decisis w porządku common law występuje w dwóch aspektach – jako związanie sądów niższych orzeczeniami sądów wyższych oraz jako horyzontalne związanie Sądu Najwyższego własnymi decyzjami. To drugie „związanie” nie jest tak mocne, jak to pierwsze, co przejawia się w przekonaniach i działaniach sędziów tego sądu, które polegają tak na przełamywaniu swoich precedensów, jak i na podkreślaniu potrzeby ich podtrzymywania. Dają się zauważyć w tym kontekście zmiany stanowiska sądu w różnych okresach jego funkcjonowania, co prowadzi jednak do negatywnej odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy precedens, który wiąże jedynie wówczas, gdy chcą tego sędziowie Sądu Najwyższego, jest w ogóle precedensem wiążącym.
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