Title: State-Court Protection of Individual Rights: The Historians' Neglect.
Abstract: In the March 1984 issue of the ABA Journal, Professor Ronald K.L. Collins of the Willamette University College of Law, writing of the continuing importance of state constitutional safeguards of individual rights, concluded that lawyers of the 1980s ought to be prepared to bring to state courts working with state law that same measure of talent and imagination that is too often reserved for federal cases. This admonition should also be addressed to students of constitutional history, for they too have neglected state constitutional law. Of course, it is not surprising, after the great expansion of federal constitutional rights, that some civil libertarians treat individual rights solely as a branch of federal constitutional law. Thus, Joel M. Gora of the American Civil Liberties Union, in his book Due Process of Law, says that while the specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights were intended to be direct limitations on the federal government, there were no comparable constitutional restrictions upon the conduct of state and local governments until shortly after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.I Unfortunately, many professional historians and other scholars seem to hold the same view. This misapprehension is both reflected and reinforced by the disregard in virtually every constitutional history textbook and anthology of developments in the states during the period between ratification of the Constitution and the twentieth-century incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the fourteenth amendment. C. Herman Pritchett's The American Constitution exemplifies the problem. Pritchett, a respected constitutional scholar, writes: Three-quarters of a century elapsed after the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution before any more amendments dealing with civil liberties were adopted. No detailed account of the application of constitutional guarantees during that period can or need
Publication Year: 1985
Publication Date: 1985-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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