Do Great Cases Make Bad Law?

"Great cases like hard cases make bad law" declared Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his dissenting opinion in the Northern Securities antitrust case of 1904. His maxim argues that those cases which ascend to the Supreme Court of the United States by virtue of their national importance, interest, or other extreme circumstance, make for poor bases upon which to construct a general law. Frequently, such cases catch the public's attention because they raise important legal issues, and they become landmark decisions from a doctrinal standpoint. Yet from a practical perspective, great cases could create laws poorly suited for far less publicly tantalizing but far more common situations. In Do Great Cases Make Bad Law?, Lackland H. Bloom, Jr. tests Justice Holmes' dictum by analyzing in detail the history of the Supreme Court's great cases, from Marbury v. Madison in 1803, to National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act case, in 2012. He treats each case with its own chapter, and explains why the Court found a case compelling, how the background and historical context affected the decision and its place in constitutional law and history, how academic scholarship has treated the case, and how the case integrates with and reflects off of Justice Holmes' famous statement. In doing so, Professor Bloom draws on the whole of the Supreme Court's decisional history to form an intricate scholarly understanding of the holistic significance of the Court's reasoning in American constitutional law.

Autorentext

Lackland H. Bloom, Jr. is a Professor of Law at the Dedman School of Law, Southern Methodist University, where he has taught constitutional law for over thirty years. Professor Bloom previously served as Law Clerk to Chief Judge John R. Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and practiced law in Washington D.C. for four years before joining the law faculty at Southern Methodist University. A specialist in constitutional law, he has published numerous articles in the areas of freedom of speech, equal protection of the laws, constitutional interpretation, and the rhetoric of Supreme Court opinions. He served as Administrative Editor of the Michigan Law Review. He is the author of Methods of Interpretation: How the Supreme Court Reads the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Zusammenfassung
&quote;Great cases like hard cases make bad law&quote; declared Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his dissenting opinion in the Northern Securities antitrust case of 1904. His maxim argues that those cases which ascend to the Supreme Court of the United States by virtue of their national importance, interest, or other extreme circumstance, make for poor bases upon which to construct a general law. Frequently, such cases catch the public's attention because they raise important legal issues, and they become landmark decisions from a doctrinal standpoint. Yet from a practical perspective, great cases could create laws poorly suited for far less publicly tantalizing but far more common situations. In Do Great Cases Make Bad Law?, Lackland H. Bloom, Jr. tests Justice Holmes' dictum by analyzing in detail the history of the Supreme Court's great cases, from Marbury v. Madison in 1803, to National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act case, in 2012. He treats each case with its own chapter, and explains why the Court found a case compelling, how the background and historical context affected the decision and its place in constitutional law and history, how academic scholarship has treated the case, and how the case integrates with and reflects off of Justice Holmes' famous statement. In doing so, Professor Bloom draws on the whole of the Supreme Court's decisional history to form an intricate scholarly understanding of the holistic significance of the Court's reasoning in American constitutional law.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Marbury v Madison 2. McCulloch v Maryland 3. Gibbons v Ogden 4. Prigg v Pennsylvania 5. Scott v Sanford 6. The Legal Tender Cases 7. The Slaughterhouse Cases 8. The civil Rights Cases 9. Pollack v Farmers Loan & Trust Co. 10. NLRB v Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. 11. Dennis v United States 12. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v Sawyer 13. Brown v Board of Education 14. The Reapportionment Cases 15. New York Times v Sullivan 16. Miranda v Arizona 17. The Pentagon Papers Case 18. Roe and Casey 19. United States v Nixon 20. Bakke, Grutter & Gratz 21. Bush v Gore 22. National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius 23. Do Great Cases make Bad Law? Index