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Friday, June 29, 2007

Courts - The Supreme Court - birth of a new jurisprudential era?

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy hosted a 90-minute review yesterday of the 2006-07 Supreme Court term. It was going on even as the opinions on the last case (the school cases) were being delivered at the Court. You can watch it online here.

One of the participants, Thomas C. Goldstein, Akin Gump Straus Hauer & Feld LLP's Supreme Court Practice Chief; Lecturer, Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School; and founder of SCOTUSblog, had these concluding remarks, which you can find at about 1:24 of the video:

What we're probably going to look back on this term as, as if it were June 15, 1961 in reverse.

June 15, 1961 was the day that Mapp v. Ohio was decided, and it was, in effect, sort of the birth of the Warren Court era. It was decided by a 5-vote majority, they overruled Wolf v. Colorado and applied the 4th Amendment to the states, and it started a whole trend, a series of cases, from Reynolds v. Sims to Frontiero v. Richardson, all of the major doctrines that law students today think of as if they were written into the Constitution, had their birth at the end of the term in 1961.

The Court can really only go the right from here in terms of what you would expect in terms of retirements. So it is very unlikely that we will start heading back to the left in any significant way. And so it may be the birth of an entirely new jurisprudential era.

Read it and weep, or read it and cheer, depending on your proclivities, but the prediction itself looks pretty sound.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 29, 2007 01:18 PM
Posted to Courts in general