Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?
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Dissenting, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943).Felix Frankfurter
» Felix Frankfurter - all quotes »
[T]he constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it. . . . It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. . . . So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is the very essence of judicial duty. . . . Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions . . . It would be giving the legislature a practical and real omnipotence . . . The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.
John Marshall
"It is a constitution that forgets the fact that most of the country's inhabitants are Muslims, or that is written by irreligious or un-Islamic hands. It is an unacceptable constitution that forgets that the Shias are the majority in this country, or that is written by the hands of their enemies. A constitution that strips from Iraq its oriental character, religious faith, ethics and history is a mischievous constitution that is not worth the paper it is written on."
Muqtada al-Sadr
"It is a constitution that forgets the fact that most of the country's inhabitants are Muslims, or that is written by irreligious or un-Islamic hands. It is an unacceptable constitution that forgets that the Shias are the majority in this country, or that is written by the hands of their enemies. A constitution that strips from Iraq its oriental character, religious faith, ethics and history is a mischievous constitution that is not worth the paper it is written on."
Muqtada Sadr
"The framers discerned fundamental principles.... But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans... The ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time? For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs. What the constitutional fundamentals meant to the wisdom of other times cannot be their measure to the vision of our time. Similarly, what those fundamentals mean for us, our descendants will learn, cannot be their measure to the vision of their time.
William J. Brennan
The Court's justification for consulting its own notions rather than following the original meaning of the Constitution, as I would, apparently is based on the belief of the majority of the Court that for this Court to be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution is an intolerable and debilitating evil; that our Constitution should not be 'shackled to the political theory of a particular era,' and that to save the country from the original Constitution the Court must have constant power to renew it and keep it abreast of this Court's more enlightened theories of what is best for our society. It seems to me that this is an attack not only on the great value of our Constitution itself but also on the concept of a written constitution which is to survive through the years as originally written unless changed through the amendment process which the Framers wisely provided.
Hugo Black
Frankfurter, Felix
Franklin, Aretha
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