CLASS NOTES: Structural, Backward-Looking, and Forward-Looking Provisions (Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases)

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Notes on video lecture:

Structural, Backward-Looking, and Forward-Looking Provisions

Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases

Professor Kermit Roosevelt, III, University of Pennsylvania

Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on October 30, 2014 (go to class or lectures)

Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

forward, free, debates, change, slaves, bad, ratified, 18th, Equal, reconciliation, marriage, allowed, society, means, now, evolutionary, lawyers, values, circumstances, Amendment, lodging, segregate, marry, grow, oppressive, different, originalism, times, interracial, change, today, never

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how do we know what the Constitution ?

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the people who wrote it believed many things that we don't believe now

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that white men could own black

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that the government could deny the vote to blacks and women

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that men should not be allowed to other men

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so in some ways, our constitutions is than the framers Constitution

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does the fact that our have changed mean that our understanding of the Constitution should change

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or is the meaning fixed for all time?

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this is one of the in constitutional law

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meanings of Constitution shouldn't

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cases must be decided the same way today as they would have been when the Constitution was

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if you want to change it, there is an provision to do that

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2. "the living constitution"

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constitution changes with the

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cases are decided in a way that makes sense for

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the Constitution is intended to last for a long time and has to with our changing society

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you have to look how the constitution's values are applied to today's

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the Supreme Court has generally followed this kind of theory

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states used to:

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public schools and buses and railroad cars by race

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ban marriage, and prevent women from being

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courts ruled that at various times in history that the Constitution was states to do all these things

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but then without a to the words of the Constitution, the courts said that states could indeed not do these things

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almost no one would be happy if the Supreme Court started to decide cases as they would have been decided back in the century when the Constitution was ratified

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Constitutional meaning does not change over time (Originalist claim)

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yet application of rights changes over time (living constitutionalists)

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example

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suppose you wanted to make sure that the Senate was respected

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the key to respect was dressing well

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"While engaged in debate, the Senators shall wear the latest fashions"

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so wearing a powdered wig in 2014 would be violating the clause

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the clause itself tells you to look to what the people consider to be fashionable at the time

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three main types of provisions that you find the Constitution

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1. structural provisions

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the structure of the government

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these meanings don't change

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cases comes out the same way today as at ratification

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2. backward-looking provisions

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look back to something that happened in the past and say: we should do that again

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e.g. banning slavery

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e.g. banning the of troops in people's houses

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we experienced these things and decided they were for the country

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3. -looking provisions

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the meaning of the clause doesn't change

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but cases may come out differently based on how has changed

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e.g. states can't segregate their schools

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e.g. states can't ban interracial

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the constitutional provision being enforced is the Protection Clause

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prohibits states from engaging in unfair or discrimination

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the courts say: in deciding what is unfair or oppressive, we are going to look at what people think and not what they thought hundreds of years ago

People:

######################### (1815-1900)

American congressman who was principal framer of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws

Republican congressman from the U.S. state of Ohio
judge advocate in the trial of the Abraham Lincoln assassination
a prosecutor in the impeachment trials of Andrew Johnson

Spelling Corrections:

Admendment ⇒ Amendment

busses ⇒ buses

interacial ⇒ interracial

Ideas and Concepts:

Via tonight's Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases class, it's hard to imagine that this was happening just a couple decades ago in America: "Anti-miscegenation laws (laws against interracial marriage) were a part of American law since before the United States was established and remained so until ruled unconstitutional in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these state laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. All anti-miscegenation laws banned the marriage of whites and non-white groups, primarily blacks, but often also Native Americans and Asians. In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile, who heard the original case which later went to the Supreme Court, defended racial marital segregation, writing:"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix."