Court Decisions Effects

Court Decisions Effects in the United States

Supreme Court of the United States: Effects of the Court’S Decisions

Introduction to Court Decisions Effects

The Supreme Court declares constitutional and legal rights, but it has no force to compel obedience to its decisions. Other branches of government have from time to time failed to comply with constitutional rules. In a few instances the government and private citizens actively resisted both the letter and spirit of the Court’s rulings. For example, Southern states followed a policy of massive resistance to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), refusing to proceed with the Court’s order to desegregate public schools.

Yet to a remarkable degree, sooner or later other branches of the federal government and state and municipal authorities fall into line, for several reasons. First, there has been a broad historical consensus that Supreme Court decisions are to be respected, so that public opinion in most instances will eventually turn against other branches that resist a Supreme Court ruling, prompting changed public policy through elections. Second, to a large extent the Court itself abides by its own decisions. This principle, known as stare decisis-let the decision stand-tends to make the law consistent and predictable, discouraging people from defying a ruling by hoping that they can go back to the Court to secure a different ruling. Third, other courts, both state and federal, are bound to follow the Supreme Court’s decisions on constitutional and federal law. Officials and private citizens alike who fail to abide by the logic of a decided case can thus be brought back to court.

The principle of stare decisis does not stop the Supreme Court from altering or overturning its own legal precedents. On occasion the Court has dramatically departed from what seemed a settled precedent. In one case the Court waited just three years before it issued a new ruling. The Court ruled in 1940 in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, by an 8-1 vote, that a public school can require schoolchildren to salute the flag, even though doing so violates their religious beliefs. For three years, members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were subject to threats and in some cases physical violence and even death for their continued resistance. In 1943 in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Court admitted its error and overruled the Gobitis case by a 6-3 vote. It said that freedom of speech means that the government cannot force people to express their beliefs.

Sometimes the reversal of a precedent can cause sweeping changes in American society. In 1937, for example, the Court ruled in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation that Congress could regulate activities that had even an indirect effect on interstate commerce. This was one of a series of cases that moved the Court away from its longstanding view that Congress had only limited power to intervene in the economy. The reversal of 19th-century precedents on the issue paved the way for Court approval of minimum wage regulations in the Fair Labor Standards Act, old-age pensions in the Social Security Act, and many other elements of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies of the 1930s.

Whether the Court’s rulings will be accepted depends in part on how far the Court departs from public opinion. Some critics object when they perceive the Court as pursuing an “activist” agenda, rather than simply interpreting the Constitution. The Court comes under even heavier fire when it appears that justices are writing their own values into the Constitution. Quite often the critics who object to an activist Court are politically conservative, and those who favor judicial activism support liberal politics. But judicial activism and conservatism do not always reflect a liberal-conservative political split. Critics of the Court’s expansion of procedural rights for criminal defendants in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, attacked the decisions as activist and politically liberal. On the other hand, critics of the Court’s suppression of the government’s power to regulate commerce in the 1920s complained that those decisions were activist and politically conservative.” (1)

Resources

Notes and References

Guide to Court Decisions Effects


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