Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution
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- čas přidán 18. 04. 2022
- A short, century-old dissenting opinion exposes the dangerous vacuum at the heart of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Ayn Rand once observed that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “has had the worst philosophical influence on American law." In this New Ideal article from October 6, 2021 (read by Alex Wigger), Tom Bowden examines the influence of Holmes's iconic dissent in the case of Lochner v. New York. "Holmes believed that the Supreme Court presides over an empty Constitution-empty of purpose, of moral content, of enduring meaning-bereft of any embedded principles defining the relationship between man and the state," Bowden observes. "This distinctively Holmesian view, novel in 1905, is today’s orthodoxy."
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Having finished listening, this is very valuable toward understanding the current state of jurisprudence and how it can return to objective principles.
What a great article! Extremely enlightening and thorough. I had never heard about Holmes and I had no idea that these kind of issues existed.
So Judge Holmes initiated non-objective law based on current, prevalent whim.
The most ironic of all, Holmes accused the opposition of doing so.
What a massive hypocrite.
if a law conflicts with a right or if a fee or tax or license or permit is attached to that right then it is unlawful , nothing can conflict with rights because they are protected by the supremacy clause , if a permit is attached to a right then the right is no longer a right , see shuttlesworth vs birmingham and marbury vs madison and the supremacy clause and murdock vs pennsyvania
What an educational podcast!
This is a remarkable essay from Tom Bowden. I regret not having seen it in its earlier issue. Thank you!
Where can I get copy of introduction to logic by Leonard Peikoff(printed or pdf )?
Purchase his book "Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand."
A printed or pdf version has never been made, there's only the audio recording.
What’s up Holmes
No coincidence.
Peckham's defense of the "police power" amounted to the statement that individual "rights" as such can be subordinated (IE: abrogated) to the "sovreign" whim of the rulers.
At best, Holmes was *nitpicking* - until and unless the "police powers" are - at the very least - held to be subordinate to the rights of the individual (or better still, abrogated entirely) - the notion of "individual rights" amounts to mere window-dressing.
At best, Holmes' dissent "said the quiet part out loud".
The U.S. was *already* irremediably fucked *long* before the Lochner decision (or the Sherman Antitrust act).
The central issue is *not* the Lochner dissent (which essentially amounts to the notion that there are no Constitutional bounds restraining the whims of legislators, and the "Supreme" court should essentially rubber-stamp such whims).
The *central* problem is the idea of the "police power" itself. Combine the "police power", which explicitly endorses legislative jack-booting (provided that such jackbooting is purportedly can be claimed to benefit "the public") - with such things as "qualified immunity" (which exempts the literal "police" from any meaningful restraints on their "enforcement" of whatever the whim-ridden legislators decree) - and you essentially have the "legal" - and procedural - infrastructure of a Totalitarian State.
The reason the vast majority of the subject populace remain ignorant of that fact is simple: our glorious Overlords have opted for a form of "soft" totalitarianism:
1. Politically this amounts to "fascism with communist slogans".
2. Especially since COVID, our "rulers" keep tightening - and then slackening - the legislative "leash" (mask mandates, etc.) seemingly at random - which conditions the subject populace to the notion that they have no *rights* - merely short-term permissions which vary according to whether their State's governor happens to be more "permissive", or not - and which, in any case, can change at a moment's notice, if our glorious Overlords decide that it is in the interest of "Public" health.
3. The Subject populace has been encouraged to agitate for their own enslavement, by means of advocating "activism" to foster "social change".
"Activism" (marching up and down chanting inane slogans) give the subject populace the illusion that they have some influence over their *rulers* - and can - by such activism - deflect the legislative jackboot onto whoever *their* preferred targets happen to be (for example: laws prohibiting Fundamentalist Christians from refusing to bake cakes for gay weddings, etc.)
4. The above-mentioned "activism" is also paired with a panoply of "pseudo-choices" - all of which are, Objectively, irrelevant (for example, the ever-increasing palette of "neo-Pronouns" and "gender"-based sub-cultures).
So long as the subject populace remain "free" to invent ridiculous new pronouns over which to squabble, most of them won't notice that they have effectively been *conscripted* into (notionally "civilian") slave-labor masquerading as a "public service" requirement for school graduation, etc.
"Lochner" is - at best - the tip of a fetid iceberg.
I'm right - deal with it
37:33 Did my dude just call conservatives pro-Holmes for condemning the Roe "court" for citing liberty as the basis for abortion? You lost me on that garbage, man. The Roe "court" didn't care about the unborn baby's right to life and liberty. That is why Roe is an unjust and illegal ruling. In fact, Roe even contradicts itself acknowledging that viability outside the womb would render the ruling null and void if medical standards could be improved to the point to save any unborn baby at any stage of development. And Roe also performs legal jujitsu to justify the preservation of laws that punish violence against pregnant women resulting in miscarriage as murder, while also allowing the pregnant females themselves to seek out abortions. And even that is contradicted by the fact that such females are punished for murder if they perform the abortion themselves rather than have an abortionist do it. Essentially, Roe hides behind the idea of "right to privacy" to allow females to murder their unborn children and avoid prosecution for murder. That ruling was the only thing dipped in the venom of Holmes' dissent. And our arrows don't just focus on the horrific outcome of the ruling, but also its twisted and baseless justifications. Your Lawrence v. Texas take is just as intellectually dishonest.
A fetus does not have rights. The only relevant entity with rights at play is the woman in that case.