One John Marshall Drive: Fill & Download for Free

Unless you have a badge, a military rank, or authority from some other position (a foreman on the job, a teacher in a classroom, etc.) you have precisely zero authority over anybody else. You have no right to ask about their handicapped sticker, or correct their driving, or run them off the road, or mouth off - period.Congress can overturn Supreme Court decisions under Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution. “…the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” So Congress can strip the Court of Jurisdiction. It’s called “jurisdiction stripping” and it freaks out a lot of people. Congress could pass a law overturning a SCOTUS decision and place the topic off limits. Nuclear Option? More like the Death Star option.Ever wonder why there were so few Bill of Rights cases before 1900? It all started with street repairs in Baltimore, silting up a wharf belonging to a man named Barron. He sued, claiming his property had been taken without due process. SCOTUS ruled that the Bill of Rights applied only to Congress and not within the States. The reasoning was that Article 1, Section 9 has a list of things Congress may not do, and Article 10 a list of things the States may not do. Even though the two lists largely overlap, the ruling was that unless something is specifically and expressly forbidden to the States, they can do it. Note that the Chief Justice was John Marshall, who, as one of the framers of the Constitution, was in a very good position to say authoritatively what the Constitution was intended to mean. The ruling is Barron v. Baltimore (1833) and gets my vote as the most important Supreme Court ruling most people have never heard of. States could, and did, ban literature and plays, support churches and ban meetings.The Fourteenth Amendment opened a crack in absolute State sovereignty by saying “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” In 1925, the Supreme Court was persuaded that State violations of free speech violated the “privileges and immunities” clause. This interpretation, which has extended almost the entire Bill of Rights to the State and local level, is called the “incorporation doctrine.” Things that are unconstitutional now weren’t always.

There’s no such thing. It’s a liberal ““moral panic” created by highly privileged and mostly white male liberals who don’t care about the longstanding freeze out of the left, the anticapitalist left, the black and other liberation movements, from positions of power and influence.One of the signatories of the recent Harper’s letter about unspecified instances of “cancel culture” is Cary Nelson of the University of Illinois, who led the successful charge to deny a promised tenured job to pro-Palestinian scholar Steven Saliata after the UI offered him the job, which he had accepted, quitting his previous tenured job, with the effect of driving him out of academia, solely for his protected pro-Palestinian activism. Saliata is now driving a school bus.And Nelson, a supposedly respected tenured professor, is moaning about cancel culture. That’s chutzpah. Tha’s the real cancel culture. Cary Nelson faces backlash over his views on a controversial scholarThese two faced liars should be shamed, rebuked, and scorned. Leftists who decry bigotry are exercising, not threatening, freedom of speech.I’m not entirely neutral here. I’ve been fired from two institutions of so called higher education, the Ohio State University philosophy department and the John Marshall Law School, for being a Marxist. I’ve been cancelled by the liberal mob.

It not only doesn’t take genius to be a Supreme Court Justice, it would probably be counterproductive. Writing a brilliant analysis of a case is not at all like solving a thorny math problem. You have 9 quite learned and savvy lawyers, all of whom know that these are not empirical questions, but rather matters of judgment. The most effective Justice is not the one with the “right” answer, but the one who can corral 4 other Justices—hopefully 8 other Justices—to collude (!). Collude means “to play together.”By those standards we’ve had only one brilliant (shining, not genius) Chief Justice, John Marshall. He founded judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, but more importantly he built the edifice of our society and economy with watershed decisions like the Dartmouth College case, and McCulloch v. Maryland (which decision he wrote in a weekend, first and only draft!).How did he do this? By being not a genius but by being collegial. He did have a singular advantage: The Supreme Court in those early years met only for a couple, three months a year. They all stayed in the same boarding house in Washington, D.C., and often they deliberated over dinner and fine wine.Thomas Jefferson loathed both our Constitution and John Marshall (long bloody story), and once he became president, Jefferson was determined to derail Marshall. He got several opportunities to name and get confirmed Justices to the Supreme Court, and each time he found someone he KNEW would vote against Marshall, and in time derail Marshall. Each one of these new Justices came to the Supreme Court, and EACH ONE fell under Marshall’s charm and judgment, all voting WITH Marshall in case after case, driving Jefferson simply mad.Chief Justice Marshall has the unmatched record of the number of unanimous decisions under the same Chief Justice. No other CJ comes even close. AND Marshall wrote an incredible percentage of those decisions.He wasn’t a genius—he was a leader.Alas, they don’t make ’em like him anymore.