Con Law Musings

Reading through old cases and notes, I remember how maddening this semester of constitutional law has been.

Here's a nice exerpt from a case involving interracial marriage:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

SIGGHHHHHH. And take a guess as to when that case came to the Supreme Court, where the court finally overturned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law?

1967. How depressing.

Then, we have Justice Scalia trying to uphold a law banning same-sex sodomy in Texas, because the states have a right to impress their moral disapproval upon minorities.

SIGGHHHHHH. And that was 2003.

Oh, and here's another one: Buck v. Bell, the state forcibly sterilized the plaintiff and 20,000 other women during the eugenics craze of the '20s. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called her "feeble-minded," "mentally deficient," and judged that "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

Guess that theory wasn't holding up too well after the whole Nazi Germany fiasco.