Opening of chapter 10: ---- The writers of the Constitution intended the judicial role to be a limited one. Their documents reflect their intent, even in the amount of attention they gave to each branch. Consider that the Constitution devotes 255 lines of copy to the powers of Congress, 114 lines of copy to the powers of the President, dent, and only 44 lines to the courts.

The fact that there was not a big restraint on the Judicial branch and didn't provide a vision of power, could anticipate problems..

Thomas Jefferson was one to see this problem early on, he said: The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the states, and the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional tutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy... The Constitution has erected no such tribunal..

Quick note: Jefferson was not apart of Constitutional Convention.

A Reminder of What Was Once Possessed:

Without God's word as our anchor we are governed by activist judges and their judicial ideas. Meaning, its up to judges what the judicial think constitutional text mean rather than what it actually says.

Note: Charles Evans Hughes said " We are under a constitution, but the constitution is what the judges say it is"

The ultimate arbiter of what the constitution is or what it should be, should not be left up to judges or a legislative body. It should go back to the legal standard that is stated in the Declaration of Independence " The laws of nature and natures God."

All elected officials and judges should be on the terms of interpreting the judicial system by the means of the Bible's standard. RIGHTS COME FROM GOD, NOT MAN.

Note: The Bible needs to be the anchor for our legal system, without it the legal system falters.

For example: That is exactly what happened on February 3, 2004, when the Massachusetts setts Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, ignored hundreds of years of legal precedent that had been clearly founded on God's law in the Bible, to rule for the first time in Massachusetts history that homosexuals have a right to marry. That decision will now affect the entire nation as homosexual couples married pursuant to that Massachusetts ruling go to other states to have their marriages validated and obtain other rights and privileges of their marital status. According to the Constitution, each state is required to recognize as valid marriages performed formed according to law in other states. Therefore, only four activist judges, who chose to ignore the law and create what they thought should be the law, have effectively impacted the laws of the entire nation.

Meaning: You can convince judges to side with you by the means of ideas in which you hope they can see and interpret, instead of focusing on God's law and what is said.

Example of Judicial Tyranny:

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas shows today's day's judicial activism run wild. The issue before the Court in Lawrence was the validity of a Texas statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in acts of sodomy.Both men were convicted and fined under the state criminal statute, but appealed their convictions, asserting that their rights under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment had been violated. The Lawrence Court found in favor of the petitioners, but in doing so it had to (I) overturn a prior Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick rendered only 17 years prior, which found a similar statute constitutional; (2) ignore countless prior judicial decisions and legislative enactments that held that a state is constitutionally justified in regulating certain deviant sexual behavior as "immoral and unacceptable," ceptable," and (3) seek refuge in similar rulings by the European Court of Human Rights and the views of "other nations!" Indeed, the Court also had to ignore another one of its decisions in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc, which upheld Indiana's public indecency statute as furthering "a substantial government interest in protecting order and morality."

Justice Scalia's thoughts on this: The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are "immoral and unacceptable," (citation) tion) - the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity." Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says, "furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual." vidual." [emphasis added] The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens' declaration in his Bowers dissent, that "the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice." This effectively tively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, terest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review."

Summary: The court feels like it can harbor and foster a pro-homosexual agenda and that it is part of private conduct and cannot be controlled by the legal system. This is an example of judicial tyranny and disregarding years and years of the legal system being against it.

Conflicting Worldviews:

Our legal views have changed, because our worldview has changed. Little by little, our nation has consistently moved away from a recognition that God is its source of law to embrace a counterfeit idea that law is evolutionary and based in the people or in the state itself. This legal philosophy is sometimes referred to as "relativism" "Pragmatism" and "legal positivism"

British scientist A. E. Wilder-Smith commented on the change of legal philosophy in his forward to The Creation of Life: Why have law and order deteriorated so rapidly in the United States? Simply because for many years it has been commonly taught that life is a random, accidental phenomenon with no meaning except the purely materialistic one. Laws are merely a matter of human expediency. Since humans are allegedly accidents, so are their laws. No wonder that the result of such teaching is a contempt for the courts and for all due order. The older supernatural views taught that life was a plan or code, which needed for its government a plan of supernaturally given codes or laws.

Note: Our nation has lived off the liberties our religious heritage has brought us for several generations, but the more we remove the source of our liberties, the more intolerant and repressive our nation becomes toward people of religious faith. Surely if one were truly objective, he or she would recognize that had our nation been formed solely on secular principles, America would never have become the beacon of liberty it once was.

Selective Acceptance of the "law of nature and of nature's God":

Our conscience knows there is a higher law -- the law of our Creator.

Court Interpretations Are No Longer Biblically Based:

Our Founders believed strongly that legitimate law starts with God and His word spoken through the Bible. Such law was unchanging, absolute, and universal in nature. Hence, when the colonists declared their independence from England in the Declaration of Independence, they did so based expressly pressly upon the power which "the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them." They further relied on "self-evident" truths, truths that are universally accepted as true, among which are that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, which cannot be taken from us because they are given to us by God. Unlike man's laws, which change with the political whims of the times, God's laws and rights remain constant and absolute.

Common law began around 1100 A.D. with the Anglo-Saxons, who established the right of "trial by jury," which was set forth in the Bible in Deuteronomy 19:15-19 and is now found in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments and Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of our Constitution. The right to a jury trial is a good example of a common law principle with a Biblical basis.

An early basis for our common law arose out of the Magna Carta in 1215. That English document recognized and established the rights of trail by jury and the principle of "habeas corpus," now found in our Constitution at Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2. The habeas corpus provision of the Magna Carta, that "no man can be confined without inquiry," as well as the entire "due process" concept of which it is a part, were revolutionary thoughts at that time.

Common law principles were continued with the Englishman Sir Edward ward Coke, who emphasized them in his works, which were studied by such early American jurists as Chancellor Kent, John Marshall, and Joseph Story. Common Law and constitutional law were therefore both originally based upon what the Declaration of Independence defined as "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God."

The Judicial Tendency to Legislate:

With absent absolutes, the court has a tendency to expand its authority beyond the well defined legal limits.

For instance, in 1973, the Court ignored hundreds of years of judicial precedent in order to invent a new constitutional right - choice - which they deemed so paramount, that it could override one of our original inalienable rights -- life. Thus, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court started down a judicially cially created path that now allows a mother to choose to take the life of her own baby, so long as she chooses before it is horn. In fact, the mother's choice is the primary determination as to whether a law is broken when the baby is killed. If the mother chooses not to keep the child, the baby is magically renamed a "fetus," and the act of deliberate killing of the child is likewise renamed "abortion" rather than "murder." Because it ignored the moral absolutes that law had always been founded upon, the Court was free to say what the law was without regard to past precedents or moral standards.

Life starts at conception, then through a process of growth that is initiated, directed, and controlled by God, results in a live birth of a baby. Even then, the growth of that life is not over. It continues throughout childhood, adolescence, and beyond. Under either common law or natural law founded on the Bible, abortion could never have been declared legal, let alone a constitutional right, since it is in direct conflict with God's revealed law. Moral and legal absolutes do not change with the latest fad; they are solid and constant, providing society with an anchor that maintains a strong culture. Yet we as a nation have discarded our Biblical anchor long ago, and so now we have lost the constitutional limitations upon which moral and legal absolutes rested.

First, Biblical principals are on point. It is God who creates life and that should not be interfered with.

Second, the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade transgresses the Founders' limitations on judicial power. Under the Constitution, it is the legislative branch that has the authority to make new laws, not the judicial branch.

Activist Courts Ignore the Separation of Powers:

There is no right of privacy in the Constitution. But, the judicial system found a way around it and found this through "penumbra"

Griswold vs. Conn.

Holding the Judicial Branch in Check:

The judicial branch is not above the law, same goes for the executive and legislative branch. Congress has the power to discipline and restrict the Courts jurisdiction.

The people also can help decide through state legislatures, amendments to constitution.

	Created by Darien G almost 9 years ago

These are notes to help build off of for flashcards, mind maps, quizzes, etc.

PLAW notes Chpt. 10