NCJ Number
116336
Journal
Missouri Law Review Volume: 52 Issue: 3 Dated: (Summer 1987) Pages: 585-606
Date Published
1987
Length
22 pages
Annotation
There is a disturbing trend afoot aimed at wrenching the Constitution free from its great historical and philosophical moorings in the name of a much distorted notion of equality.
Abstract
This emerging a constitutional or even anticonstitutional jurisprudence -- moved largely by a seemingly unrelenting commitment to a radically egalitarian society -- poses a great danger to individual rights and liberties under the written Constitution. This challenge to the Constitution has come both from the bench and from legal academia. This radically egalitarian jurisprudence, espoused by Justice Brennan and Ronald Dworkin among others, is less solicitous of the Constitution's structural arrangements than it is of an appreciation of evolving moral standards. It is a jurisprudence that seeks, not limited Government in order to secure individual liberty, but unlimited judicial power to further personalized visions of an egalitarian society. The written Constitution is as viable a document today as when it was embraced by the Founding Fathers. The theory of limited Government that it embraces provides the greatest security for individual rights. The Framers did not devise a system of Government in which the responsibilities of the executive, legislative, and judicial would become so blurred that the least powerful of the three would become the most powerful. It is this intricate balance between and among governmental authorities at the State and Federal levels that is the true guarantor of rights. 95 footnotes.