Читать книгу Justice Rehnquist, the Supreme Court, and the Bill of Rights - Steven T. Seitz - Страница 21

Tracing the development of clauses (e.g., freedom of speech) in the Bill of Rights gives us a picture of both the stability and points of change. For example, has the court always interpreted the 1st Amendment the same way? What of the establishment clause? What has been the evolution of interpretations? Looking at isolated cases or decision-makers alone cannot give a sense of this development but that is really what we must understand if we want to put these clauses in temporal perspective and understand interpretive stability. The addition of the Civil War Amendments was a sea change in the balance of sovereignties between the central government and the state governments. The due process clause of the 14th Amendment eventually allowed the incorporation of Bill-of-Rights limits against state governments, hitherto just limits on the central government. The states became the greatest offenders of civil rights. Anti-Federalist concerns about an overreaching central government became a Federalist unification cry against overreaching state governments and their abuses. This was not just a change of coalitions, which indeed was underway, but a persistent limitation on how state governments treated some of their citizens.