Constitutional Law
Constitutional Law
The articles under this heading deal with the major substantive concerns of American constitutional law. For broader aspects of these topics seeJudicial process; Judiciary; Public law. A guide to related articles appears underLaw.
I. IntroductionC. Herman Pritchett
II. Distribution of PowersJohn P. Roche
III. Civil LibertiesRobert G. McCloskey
IV. Civil RightsMilton R. Konvitz
I INTRODUCTION
Constitutional law is law derived from, related to, or interpretive of a constitution. The term may in fact be used synonymously with constitution, since the function of a constitution is to provide the basic law for a governmental regime. But it is more common, at least in governments with written constitutions, for the term constitution to refer to the actual text of the basic document, while constitutional law connotes the constitution as interpreted and applied by the organs of government and as elaborated and rationalized by scholarly commentators.
Every regime must have an organizational framework, an agreed division of responsibilities among public instrumentalities, and a system of definitions of individual rights and status in the community. In a traditional society these arrangements and understandings are established by custom, but in more modern societies they are subject, through a process of conscious choice, to determination or revision by the policy-making institutions of government. These determinations have, since the adoption of the American and French constitutions toward the close of the eighteenth century, generally been codified in a comprehensive written document that has status superior to ordinary statute law and that can be amended only by a special legislative procedure.
In England, however, it has proved possible to proceed on into the twentieth century without any systematic codification of the rules of the political system. Constitutional law in England consequently cannot be clearly distinguished from other public law, since it has no superior legal authority; and any constitutional practice, even the most fundamental, can be overridden or revised by act of Parliament. A treatise on English constitutional law is simply a treatment of all the written and unwritten law generally considered essential to the operation of the governmental system.
Where, as is now generally the case, a written constitutional instrument is in existence, constitutional law is a formal category of law defined by the scope and provisions of the document. Any matter covered in the constitution, even arrangements of slight general importance, takes on the stature of constitutional law. Conversely, matters not covered in the constitution, no matter how important—such as political parties not being included in the U.S. constitution—are not subjects of constitutional law.
Responsibility for interpretation
Where a written constitution provides the foundation for a political regime, the principles of constitutional law for that regime are derived by interpretation of the language of the document; these interpretations are then applied in making governmental decisions and settling constitutional controversies. Some constitutional language is so specific that little interpretation is required, as, for example, the provision that the U.S. president “shall hold his office during the term of four years.” But most constitutional language leaves room for varying views as to its meaning, and such provisions as “due process of law” or “freedom of speech” or “unreasonable searches and seizures” can never be applied without making a choice among alternative interpretations.
Whose responsibility is it to interpret a written constitution and authoritatively to declare constitutional law? An important part of this function falls to the executive branch, which must inevitably and continually interpret the constitution in making decisions on the use of executive power. In 1841 a U.S. president died in office for the first time. The language of the constitution left it unclear whether it was the “office,” or only the “powers and duties” of the office which devolved on the vice-president. This important constitutional question had to be determined by the then vice-president, John Tyler, who, after some initial hesitation, decided that he was actually president and not simply vice-president acting as president. This view was quickly accepted as the constitutional law on presidential succession.
Congress also must continuously construe the constitution as a guide to action. For example, the constitution authorizes the president to make treaties, “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” George Washington assumed that this provision meant that he should sit down with the senators and get their advice on treaties while they were being negotiated, but when he went to the Senate for this purpose, the senators preferred not to discuss the matter in his presence and voted to refer it to a committee. Washington had no choice but to withdraw, yielding to the Senate's interpretation of “advice and consent,” and no subsequent president has ever sought to repeat this tactic.
These two instances indicate how it is possible for the executive and the legislature to make binding interpretations of their own respective powers under a constitution. In fact, it was argued by many during the early years of the American republic that each branch of government should be the authoritative interpreter of all those provisions dealing with its own status and powers. However, this tripartite theory of constitutional interpretation was strongly challenged by Justice Marshall in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison (1 Cranch 137), where he asserted the primacy of judicial interpretation of the constitution.
In the Marbury case the Supreme Court declined to enforce a statute duly enacted by Congress because, as Marshall interpreted the act, it was contrary to the constitution. The judicial power to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional is not explicitly stated in the constitution, and the argument as to whether the drafters intended the Court to have such power has never been entirely settled. Some of the major battles of American politics have resulted from legislative or executive resistance to the Court's interpretations, and notable efforts have been made to deny the supremacy of judicial views on constitutional interpretation. Both Andrew Jackson in his veto of the Bank Bill in 1832 and Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address took this position.
In spite of such opposition, the Supreme Court's qualifications to act as pre-eminent interpreter of the constitution have been generally accepted. The Court has minimized resistance to its role by adopting rules of self-restraint, which keep it from passing on certain constitutional questions of a “political” nature, and has generally been deferential toward the constitutional interpretations by the president and Congress. It has seldom asserted a constitutional position that challenged a dominant popular opinion, although there have been such “self-inflicted wounds” as the Dred Scott decision in 1857 and the invalidation of the income tax in 1895.
During the twentieth century the Court's most serious miscalculations on constitutional issues came in 1935 and 1936, when it declared a number of New Deal statutes unconstitutional. President Roosevelt was unable to get through Congress legislation authorizing him to appoint additional justices who would support the New Deal; but in 1937 the Court itself reversed its position, thus terminating the dispute. Two decades later the Court's constitutional views again became the center of controversy, primarily on the issue of racial segregation in the public schools, but also on certain national security issues in 1957, on legislative apportionment in 1962, and on the problem of religion in the public schools in 1962 and 1963.
The enormous prestige of the United States Supreme Court has helped to popularize judicial review of legislation and judicial supremacy in constitutional interpretation. Prior to World War II it was primarily in federal systems within the British Commonwealth—notably Canada and Australia— that courts with constitutional responsibilities somewhat comparable to the U.S. Supreme Court were found. However, following World War II constitutional courts were established in West Germany, Italy, India, and elsewhere.
Principles of interpretation
Wherever the process of constitutional interpretation goes on, it must be guided by some more or less articulate theory about the extraction of meaning from constitutional language. The interpreter cannot merely insist that the constitution means whatever he wants it to mean, or at least he cannot admit such an approach to the interpretative process. For the essence of constitutional purpose is to establish a degree of certainty, to impose limitations that will affect all alike, and to give effect to rules that are external to the value system of the interpreter. Various approaches to the establishment of stable constitutional meanings have been proposed.
First, it may be contended that the constitution should mean what its framers meant it to mean. In the United States it is a rare constitutional debate in which someone does not appeal to “the intention of the framers.” Thus, when the question is raised whether reciting prayers in public schools is an “establishment of religion,” it will be argued by some that this depends upon what the members of the first Congress meant by this phrase when they were drafting the first amendment. In the case of some provisions, the purpose of the drafters may seem reasonably clear from the language of the document or the historical data. But generally this is not true. Constitutional language is always the product of group effort and compromise and may be deliberately chosen to bridge over differences of opinion. The intentions involved are the intentions of many individuals who participated to a greater or lesser degree and at various stages in the process of constitutional draftsmanship and subsequent ratification. The proceedings of the Constitutional Convention are known largely through the incomplete notes taken by James Madison. Some of the men who participated in drafting the constitution were in wide disagreement about its intention within a few years.
Because individual and group intentions are difficult to determine, a second theory of constitutional interpretation proposes concentration on word meanings. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “We ask, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used” ([1885–1918] 1952, p. 204). This method employs somewhat narrower lexicographic skills as compared with the social historicism on which the first method relies. It is more rigorously confined by the document itself and more closely related to the processes by which the written instruments of private law are construed.
An alternative to these two basically historical methods of determining constitutional meaning is the approach of logical analysis, which was heavily used by Chief Justice Marshall in his great decisions. In Marbury v. Madison, for example, Marshall cites no judicial decisions to support his arguments and, although referring to “original intention,” makes no effort to quote contemporaneous evidence or opinion. His argument is primarily an exercise in logic. “It seems only necessary to recognize certain principles,” he says, “supposed to have been long and well established, to decide [the case].” The major principle is that the constitution is the supreme law of the land. The Supreme Court has taken an oath to uphold the constitution. The conclusion logically follows that when an act of Congress conflicts with the superior law, the Supreme Court cannot enforce it, but must declare it null and void.
This position has been so long accepted that the logic supporting it may seem unassailable. But it is equally logical to argue that the constitution is the supreme law of the land, and since the president has taken an oath to support the constitution he cannot enforce a Supreme Court decision that conflicts with the constitution, but must declare it null and void. The problem is simply not one to which logic can guarantee a correct answer. The limitations on the contribution of logic can be made clearer by stating a part of Marshall's argument as a syllogism.
Major premise: A law repugnant to the constitution is void.
Minor premise: This law is repugnant to the constitution.
Conclusion: This law is void.
Assuming the validity of the major premise, the soundness of the conclusion depends upon whether the minor premise is factually true. But logic cannot tell us whether a particular law is repugnant to the constitution. That is a matter of informed opinion and judgment. Justice Holmes, in one of his most famous passages from The Common Law ([1881] 1963, p. 5) disparaged the logical approach: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”
It seems clear that no one rule of constitutional interpretation can be asserted to be the proper or sole approach to constitutional understanding. A constitution is more a political than a legal document. Consequently, all of the factors that go into the formation of divergent political preferences will also be operative in the minds of constitutional interpreters, be they executives, legislators, or judges. How a constitution will be read depends in large part upon the men who are doing the reading and how the world looks to them. The constitutional system is not separate from the political system, but a necessary part of it, performing the vital function of giving order and structure to the processes of policy formation. Holmes put the conception of a “living” constitution into eloquent language when he wrote:
… when we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago. (Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416, 1920)
Stability and change
The central problem in the development of a system of constitutional law is, as Holmes suggests, to recognize the need for adapting and changing to meet new circumstances, while preserving the basic values of the constitutional system. In a world growing constantly more crowded and complex with new ideas, new technical developments, new ways of living, new standards of social responsibility, and new world crises, the pressure on constitutional rules established to meet the different conditions of an earlier day will inevitably force their revision or abandonment.
The most obvious method of adapting constitutional law to changed conditions is to replace the old constitution with a new one. When an existing political system is overthrown, the new holders of power customarily seek to organize and legitimize their regime by the adoption of a new constitution. It is an index to the political instability of France that it has had 15 constitutions since the Revolution. American states also adopt new constitutions often, but not because of political upheaval. State constitutions tend to be very long and detailed, regulating the minutiae of the state and local governmental system, and can become obsolete quite rapidly. Periodically, therefore, states find it more expedient to draft a new constitution than to attempt to patch up the old one.
More commonly, the process of constitutional adaptation is achieved by amendment, interpretation, and custom. The drafters of the U.S. constitution were the first to recognize the need for making provision within the document itself for its own revision. The presence of the amending clause was one of the factors that led Thomas Jefferson, originally inclined to oppose the constitution, to decide in its favor.
The method of amending the constitution is usually more difficult than the passage of normal legislation, although this is not true in some countries, such as New Zealand and the Republic of South Africa. The arrangements for amending the U.S. constitution, requiring approval by two-thirds of each house of Congress and three-fourths of the states, have on occasion been criticized as too difficult. Following the Civil War amendments (thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth), there was a period of more than forty years during which the constitution appeared unamendable, in spite of strong pressure for revision to meet the problems of a rapidly expanding economy. But between 1913 and 1933 six amendments were added to the constitution, and the experience with the eighteenth (prohibition) amendment showed that it was even possible for a small but dedicated pressure group to exploit the amending machinery.
Article 89 of the French constitution provides for amendment of the constitution by vote of parliament. In 1962, however, President de Gaulle ignored this method and submitted to a popular referendum an amendment providing for election of the president by popular vote instead of by limited suffrage. In Australia proposed amendments, after passage by each house of Parliament, must be approved by a popular referendum throughout Australia and also by a majority vote in four of the six states. The Canadian constitution (British North America Act of 1867) contains no provision for its own amendment; consequently, constitutional change has required recourse to the original source of the constitution, the British Parliament.
The amending power has been less important in the development of the U.S. constitution than has the previously discussed process of interpretation. The document, drafted in 1787, could scarcely have met the needs of a world power in the twentieth century unless it had been construed with some flexibility. It was one of John Marshall's greatest achievements that he saw the need for a broad construction of the constitution. “We must never forget, that it is a constitution we are expounding,” he said, one that is “intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs” (McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheaton 316, 1819).
Revising a constitution by interpretation does create both theoretical and practical problems. Justice Frankfurter once suggested that “nothing new can be put into the Constitution except through the amendatory process. Nothing old can be taken out without the same process” (Ullmann v. United States, 350 U.S. 422, 1956). It must be presumed that he was using this rather extreme method of warning that if a constitution is to fulfill its function of acting as a stabilizing and controlling influence in a political system, the interpretations given to it must be maintained with some measure of continuity, and the agencies that interpret and apply the constitution must feel under some compulsion to accept the views announced by their predecessors.
Regard for precedent is, of course, one of the foundation stones of legal systems generally, applicable in both constitutional and statutory interpretation. However, the principle of stare decisis, necessary as it is in the settlement of normal legal controversies, presents unusual difficulties when applied to constitutional meanings. If a constitutional interpretation, once announced, can be modified only by constitutional amendment, an impossible burden is thrown on the amending machinery. The U.S. Supreme Court has, therefore, on occasion overruled its earlier decisions. One of the most noteworthy instances of the overruling of a prior constitutional position occurred in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S. 483). In an 1896 decision the Supreme Court had held that segregated facilities for Negroes were not a violation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment, provided they were the “equal” of the facilities provided for white persons. But when the Court had to decide in 1954 whether racial segregation was permissible in the public schools, it held unanimously that “we cannot turn the clock back … to 1896. … We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.” Such consideration convinced the Court that the rule of “separate but equal” was no longer compatible with the concept of equal protection under the laws, and consequently it was abandoned.
The study of constitutional law
Traditionally, students of constitutional law have concerned themselves with collecting and analyzing constitutional interpretations and organizing and rationalizing them into a coherent system. Some constitutional commentators gain such prestige by the force of their reasoning that they themselves become authoritative sources of constitutional law. Thomas Cooley's A Treatise on Constitutional Limitations (1868), which appeared in the same year the fourteenth amendment was adopted, so effectively argued for the doctrine of implied constitutional limitation on the powers of American states that it was a powerful force toward the stricter judicial review of state legislative action that characterized the latter part of the nineteenth century.
In the twentieth century the general constitutional commentary has tended to give way to treatises on the constitutional status of particular institutions, such as Corwin's The President: Office and Powers (1940) or Jennings' Parliament (1940). There have also been frequent analyses of the application and interpretation of specific constitutional provisions, such as Chafee's study of the first amendment in Free Speech in the United States (1941). Constitutional law has been taught in U.S. colleges and law schools almost entirely by use of Supreme Court decisions collected in casebooks, reflecting the degree to which constitutional interpretation is monopolized by the courts.
Behavioral trends in the social sciences have had a significant impact on the study of constitutional law. As early as 1913, Charles Beard argued that economic advantage had motivated the framers of the constitution. Later, prominent political scientists such as Corwin and Robert Cushman, biographers of Supreme Court justices such as Swisher (1930) and Mason (1956), and the school of legal realists headed by Jerome Frank (1930) all emphasized the influence of judicial personality on constitutional interpretation. Finally, in the 1950s, judicial behavior, particularly the decision making of the Supreme Court, began to be subjected to study through a whole armory of sociological and psychological tools, including voting bloc analysis, small group theory, Guttman scaling, vector analysis, and game theory (Schubert 1963).
C. Herman Pritchett
[See alsoPresidential government.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anson, William R. (1886–1892) 1922–1935 The Law and Custom of the Constitution. 2 vols., 5th ed. Oxford: Clarendon. ? Volume 1: Parliament. Volume 2: The Crown.
Beard, Charles A. (1913) 1961 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: Macmillan.
Chafee, Zechariah, Jr. 1941 Free Speech in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? Supersedes Chafee's Freedom of Speech, 1920.
Cooley, Thomas M. (1868) 1927 A Treatise on Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union. 2 vols., 8th ed. Boston: Little.
Corwin, Edward S. (1928–1929) 1959 The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. ? First published in the Harvard Law Review.
Corwin, Edward S. (1940) 1957 The President: Office and Powers. 4th rev. ed. New York Univ. Press.
Dicey, Albert V. (1885) 1961 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. 10th ed. With an Introduction by E. C. S. Wade. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins. ? First published as Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Law of the Constitution.
Douglas, William O. 1956 We the Judges: Studies in American and Indian Constitutional Law From Marshall to Mukherjea. New York: Doubleday.
Frank, Jerome (1930) 1949 Law and the Modern Mind. New York: Coward-McCann.
Freund, PAUL A. 1961 The Supreme Court of the United States: Its Business, Purposes, and Performance. Cleveland: World.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1881) 1963 The Common Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1885–1918) 1952 Collected Legal Papers. Edited by Harold J. Laski. New York: Smith.
Jennings, William Ivor (1940) 1957 Parliament. 2d ed. Cambridge Univ. Press.
McWhinney, Edward (1956) 1960 Judicial Review in the English-speaking World. 2d ed. Univ. of Toronto Press.
Mason, Alpheus T. 1956 Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law. New York: Viking.
Murphy, Walter F. 1962 Congress and the Court: A Case Study in the American Political Process. Univ. of Chicago Press.
Pritchett, C. Herman (1948) 1963 The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1937–1947. New York: Octagon Books.
Pritchett, C. Herman 1959 The American Constitution. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schubert, Glendon (editor) 1963 Judicial Decisionmaking. International Yearbook of Political Behavior Research, Vol. 4. New York: Free Press.
Schubert, Glendon (editor) 1964 Judicial Behavior: A Reader in Theory and Research. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Story, Joseph (1833) 1891 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. 2 vols., 5th ed. Boston: Little.
Swisher, Carl B. (1930) 1963 Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press.
Warren, Charles (1923) 1937 The Supreme Court in United States History. 2 vols., rev. ed. Boston: Little.
II DISTRIBUTION OF POWERS
From the beginnings of political speculation, much time and theoretical effort have been assigned to the demarcation and definition of jurisdictions between competing elites within various societies. While the bases of jurisdiction have shifted over the centuries, one can hear in contemporary Israel echoes of Old Testament disputes between kings and prophets, and in contemporary America the rhetoric of states' rights has archetypal resemblances to the polemical literature of the early modern struggle between royal centralists and feudal autonomists. And although the external form of modern disputes is radically different from earlier jurisdictional disputes, the key issue has not altered in two thousand years, namely, where does the final jurisdiction to define jurisdictions rest?
This issue has always been, and remains today, the crux of the matter; in the vocabulary of modern politics it is known, of course, as the question of sovereignty. Even the most ultramontane pope never denied the existence of the imperium, the emperor's sector of jurisdiction. Nor did the most ambitious of the Holy Roman emperors ever assert that the sacerdotium, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, was nonexistent. But a struggle raged for centuries that, although seemingly centered on the scope of the respective jurisdictions, was in fact directed to the antecedent problem of ultimate determination of the appropriate forum for settlement of jurisdictional disputes. Archbishop Thomas a Becket's argument in his confrontation with Henry ii in 1164 over the question of the criminous clerk (Pollock & Maitland [1895] 1952, vol. 1, pp. 447–457) was thus at base analogous to the logic of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798–1799; like the archbishop, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison denied their opponents the right to define their own jurisdictions.
Every political community larger than the Greek polis has been faced with the problem of distributing power, at least in functional terms. Subgovernments—provinces, exarchates, shires, communes, etc.—have been established for purposes of administrative convenience. Other varieties of subgovernment have originated from more complex origins, for example, Huguenot autonomy in France as a consequence of the Edict of Nantes, Scottish privileges under the Act of Union with England, Turkish communal rights as stipulated in the Cypriot constitution. In this context, what problems arise do so as a result of ambiguity in the relationship of the peripheral units to the center. When sovereignty, i.e., the final power to define jurisdictions, clearly resides in the center, we have what is commonly called a “unitary” system. In France, for example, the authority of départements, arrondissements, and communes—the units of subgovernment—is clearly subject to determination by the central government. This does not prevent occasional conflicts: communist-dominated communes from time to time invoked the wrath of the minister of the interior by banning hydrogen bombs from their territory, passing resolutions against the Algerian war, or renaming streets after communist heroes, but the results contributed more in the way of publicity than jurisprudence. The offending local council, in such instances, is simply dissolved by order of the central government.
At the other end of the spectrum we find the confederation, which is characterized by the fact that the powers of the central government are subject to definition by the peripheral units. A classic instance of this type of government was the United States under the Articles of Confederation; a modern example is Switzerland, where residual power still—in theory if not always in practice—rests with the component cantons.
Between these two polar positions can be found a huge variety of intermediate forms of which the most significant for our purpose is American federalism. For almost two centuries political theorists have been attempting to define “federalism,” and have had uniformly disastrous results because in analytical terms federalism is an institutionalized technique of question begging. It is, to put the matter differently, an effort to exorcise sovereignty from the political sector. Since definition is therefore understandably elusive, we shall have to settle for a description drawn from K. C. Wheare, which suggests that federalism is a system in which two levels of government operate within the same geographical limits and neither has the power to destroy the other. [SeeFederalism.]
However, before turning to a historical examination of the distribution of powers between the American national government and the states, it would be advantageous to define the other major dimension of the distribution of power: the relationship of various agencies of government to one another—or, in the American context, the issue of the separation of powers within the national government. Again, the problem is one that has been canvassed since the time of Aristotle (Politics 1298a40), although the form that the “separation of powers” took among political theorists through the eighteenth century was almost totally irrelevant to the American innovation. From Polybius and Cicero through Montesquieu, the “separation of powers” involved the allocation of governmental functions to orders of the realm or to estates, with the ideal result of a mixed government or “polity.” Thus, Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologica Quaestio cv), discussing the “right ordering of power in a principality,” argued that the best form of constitution incorporated a “judicious admixture of the kingdom … of aristocracy … and of democracy.”
This was the essence of medieval constitutionalism—the conciliar movement, indeed, attempted with ephemeral success symbolized in the Frequens decree, issued in 1417 by the Council of Constance, to apply this formula to the government of the church—and it provided the foundation for Montesquieu's famous chapter in The Spirit of the Laws (1748): “On the Constitution of England.” To state the point differently, the tripartite division of the United States constitution was not intended to balance the authority of the “one, the few, and the many”; it was a functional differentiation between governmental organs. John Locke's notion of the “separation of powers” was founded on another premise, but one equally irrelevant to American constitutional law. It is true that Locke identified a threefold division of powers (”The Second Treatise of Government” 1690), but he never asserted the equivalence of his three branches: his “executive” was a thoroughly dependent figure (§152) and, so far as domestic jurisdiction was concerned, was little more than an agent of the “supreme” legislative power (§149). And his third division, the “federative,” was indeed given wide authority and prerogative—but only for the purpose of conducting foreign relations (§147). The judiciary was attached to the executive.
What then are the origins of the American doctrine of the '”separation of powers”? What did this doctrine involve in practice? By what means and to what degree has it been incorporated in American constitutional law? These are the issues that will concern us in the last section of this analysis. First, however, we shall examine the division of powers in the American federal system, that is, the relationship between the national government and the states.
The division of powers
The American federal system has been widely acclaimed as a great, even original, contribution to political science, and it has provided the model for many subsequent governments. Federalism has always appealed to spokesmen for vested minority interests—whether religious, ethnic, or economic— who are seeking institutional guarantees against the power of a majority (Riker 1964). Nowhere has the connection between the integrity of the peripheral jurisdiction, i.e., the states, and the privileges and property of a national minority— slaveholders—been expressed more cogently than in John C. Calhoun's A Disquisition on Government (1851). Today we can discern variations on the Calhoun theme in the rhetoric of the Cypriot Turks, the French Canadians, the Ceylonese Tamils, the Fijis (outnumbered on their ancestral islands by Indians), the Nigerian Yoruba—to name only a few instances.
The theory that underpins this adulation is that federalism provides a viable framework for the reconciliation of majority power and minority rights. In terms of the distribution of power, the model rests on two assumptions: first, the central government has a plenary jurisdiction over certain sectors of policy making; second, certain other sectors of decision making are reserved in equally plenary fashion to the peripheral units (states, provinces, ethnic or religious communities). Obviously, such a system requires a written constitution, and for our purposes it is irrelevant whether residual power remains with the peripheral units (for example, U.S. constitution, article x of the bill of rights) or the center (for example, Canada under the provisions of the British North America Act of 1867).
In principle, then, an impenetrable wall is built between the jurisdiction of the center and the jurisdiction of the peripheral units. The nation as a whole exercises the necessary sovereignty to hold its place in the international community, while within the society the rights of minorities are protected from “nationalization.” The character of the minorities may vary widely; in the United States— as in Australia—geographical prescription served as the justification for the establishment of the peripheral units: the previously self-governing units were integrated as the operating components of federalism. In Canada and the Union of South Africa, geography mixed with ethnic considerations (the French in Quebec, the Afrikaners in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony) supplied the rationale.
It has been suggested (McLaughlin 1932) that when the framers of the United States constitution met in Philadelphia in 1787, they found the theoretical and practical arguments for federalism overwhelming, largely as an outgrowth of their colonial experience. In their struggle with the British over the status of the colonies, American spokesmen developed a wide-ranging theory of American rights. However, it is hard to assert that the colonial experience provided a formula for the new federal experiment; on the contrary, it supplied full support for precisely the form of association that the Constitutional Convention destroyed: the Articles of Confederation. The essence of the colonial position vis-à-vis the British was that the Americans had the right to define the jurisdiction of king and parliament, i.e., the peripheral units defined the authority of the center, the very principle that later was incorporated into the Articles of Confederation. Curiously, then, when the framers set to work to limit the authority of the states (and the caprice of “Rogues Island”), the arguments they utilized were drawn from the British, not the American, arsenal. They were in search of sovereignty in the classic Hobbesian sense, and, with few exceptions, took a dim theoretical view of states' rights.
This may seem to be an eccentric interpretation, flying as it does in the face of conventional wisdom. However, it has the great merit of being solidly grounded on the proceedings in the Constitutional Convention (Roche [1952–1963] 1964, pp. 91–126), rather than on the a posteriori theoretical patina supplied by The Federalist. The views of “Publius” on the high merits of the constitution were analogous to a man's eulogies of a wife he had secretly been forced to marry: both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had supported the establishment of a unitary system at the convention, but debates were secret and no significant record was published until after Madison's death in 1836. What had occurred at the convention was that a strong unitary system—the “Randolph Plan,” prepared by Madison—which put the states completely at the mercy of the nation, was modified into what later became known as federalism. The latter was an improvisation that only subsequently was promoted into a political theory. In practical terms, it was a compromise between the unitary convictions of the delegates and their sense of political reality; the leading opponents of the Randolph Plan endorsed its goals but argued that it would be an act of political suicide to return to their constituent states with such a radical innovation. Thus the scope of national power over the peripheral units was cut down, the sectors of national jurisdiction stipulated, and the states given equal representation in the Senate. In the course of ratification, proponents of the new government were forced to promise a bill of rights as a further safeguard to the jurisdiction of the states.
When the constitution went into operation and the newly elected officials assembled in New York, there was nothing particularly lucid about federalism. The constitution was a model of studied ambiguity at certain key points, reflecting its authors' pragmatic notion that the best way to deal with sticky problems was to turn them over to the future unclarified. The institutions of the new republic were provided for, but even here a conflict in the convention had resulted in a semantic compromise: Congress was given the power to establish an independent federal judiciary (below the Supreme Court, which was explicitly created) but left with discretion to utilize inferior state judicial machinery for national purposes if it so chose. Yet the distribution of power within the national government was a model of clarity when compared with the relationship between the latter and the states.
An early dictionary, which Sir Ernest Barker was fond of quoting, defined a cello as a big violin and a violin as a small cello. The relationship between national and state powers under the constitution was a similar exercise in logical circularity. In the body of that document there was no discussion whatever of the distribution of power between the center and the peripheral units; state objections led to the addition of the ninth and tenth amendments in 1791, but these did little more than restate the central ambiguity. Article ix announced that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Article x provided that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
In other words, the ninth and tenth amendments, like the constitution itself, ignored the crucial institutional question: How, and by whom, were jurisdictional conflicts between states and nation to be resolved? What was to be the truth-finding mechanism in this open-ended situation? The immediate answer is the United States Supreme Court, and although there is no direct evidence that the framers intended the Court to exercise this supervision over the distribution of powers (there was no recorded discussion of the problem in the Constitutional Convention), circumstantial evidence supports this contention. The Supreme Court's power to review both acts of Congress and state legislation was probably taken for granted; indeed, the notion of a written constitution containing limitations on states and nation carried with it a need for machinery of enforcement, and the Supreme Court seems to have been assigned this task sub silentio.
The constitution was hardly ten years old before the question of states' rights shook the new republic to its foundations. In a desperate effort to hold their slipping popularity, the Federalists, marshaled by Alexander Hamilton, attempted in 1798–1799 to cripple the Jeffersonians by national legislation, primarily in the Sedition Act of 1798, which was designed to muzzle the Jeffersonian press. The Jeffersonians lost the battle in Congress and then appealed to the courts to declare the Sedition Act unconstitutional as an intrusion on states' rights. The litigation never reached the Supreme Court, but at the circuit level the act was sustained as a legitimate exercise of congressional power. At this point, Jefferson and Madison realized that the rules had to be changed, that it was improper for an agency of the general government to have the right to assess the national jurisdiction, that, in Locke's phrase, “no one should be a judge in his own cause.” The result was the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798–1799, the former prepared by Madison, the latter secretly drafted by Vice-president Jefferson, which attempted to reopen the whole issue of distribution of powers. These resolutions have served ever since as the intellectual fountainhead for states' rights formulations.
Jefferson put the question concisely:
… the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact… they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: … That the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; … but that as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common Judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress. (Kentucky resolutions, Nov. 16, 1798)
Thus began the states' rights tradition. In characteristic American fashion, it was an ad hoc response to political peril by the losing faction in national politics; Jefferson and Madison took a very dim view indeed of the logic of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions when the latter were employed against the embargo of 1807 by Federalist state governments in New England (Levy 1963, pp. 93–141). Moreover, in a paradoxical fashion, Jefferson and Madison were engaged in precisely the behavior they were criticizing: their concept of “compact” made the states the final judges of the extent of the powers of the general government, i.e., made the states judges in “their own cause.” Each side engaged in petitio principii by silently incorporating their conclusions in their premises: on the one hand, the centralist view was founded on the assumption that the national government was founded by “the people”; on the other, the states' rights position rested on the notion that the states as integral units of sovereignty had made a “compact.” And history was ransacked by all hands to “prove” the validity of the respective cases —with what a historian must report as inconclusive results.
But the problems of Jefferson and Madison fade into insignificance when compared with the definitional crisis that precipitated the Civil War. This is not the place to examine the constitutional turmoil over slavery except to note that the crucial question was not juridical, but moral, and was thus insoluble by legal mechanisms. If one took for granted that a Negro slave was “property,” then the injunction of the fifth amendment that no person “shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” stood as a massive barrier against national regulation of the South's “peculiar institution.” If, in contrast, one assumed that a Negro slave was a “person,” then slavery constituted an unconstitutional limitation on his life and liberty. Pace Chief Justice Taney's efforts in Dred Scott v. Sanford (60 U.S. 393, 1857), one does not settle this order of problem in a court of law.
The Union victory in the Civil War gave the compact theory its coup de grace, and in State of Texas v. White (74 U.S. 700, 1869), the Supreme Court gave ideological approval to the work of Lincoln's armies. In constitutional terms, however, states' rights lived on and was from time to time extracted from the museum of antiquities as a device for limiting federal legislation deemed “radical” by a majority of the Supreme Court (see Corwin 1936; 1938; 1941). It is reasonable to argue that in the 1960s states' rights constituted no meaningful legal barrier to the exercise of national authority, and that the federal government operating in a national economy could reach any objective it wished through the exercise of the commerce power, the taxing power, or—as in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—a combination of the commerce power and the long-ignored jurisdiction provided by the fourteenth amendment.
Yet, curiously, to say this is not to assert that the United States has achieved a unitary form of government. Indeed, in net terms the substantive power of the states today is greater than it has ever been. What has occurred is a remarkable de facto distribution of power between states and nation (sometimes called “cooperative federalism”), in which the state governments exercise enormous autonomy. For many areas of public policy, for example, education, public welfare, urban renewal, road construction, federal funds are extensively provided to supplement local resources. In these areas the states are, in effect, “sovereign,” provided they do not push their autonomy too hard or attempt to assert a theoretical basis for their jurisdiction. However, if state officials try to assert final power through gerrymanders, discriminatory practices in race relations, taxation of interstate commerce, the Supreme Court tends to reaffirm the principle of national supremacy. Moreover, since the states are the effective units of political party organization they often provide political obstacles to centralization that are far more effective than their constitutional position might indicate.
In short, the United States in a highly non-theoretical fashion has developed a relationship between the center and the peripheral units built around the operating principles of de jure national supremacy and de facto local autonomy. Most of the time this relationship works extremely well on the basis of a political consensus not to clarify issues of sovereignty but, rather, to get on with the business of governance.
The separation of powers
The doctrine of the separation of powers has occupied a distinguished position in the history of American constitutionalism. In its classic formulation the doctrine had two operating principles. The first was set forth by John Adams in article xxx of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780: “In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.” The second, drawn from a maxim attributed to Bracton, announced that delegata potestas non potest delegari, that delegated powers could not be further delegated, for example, that authority delegated to Congress by article I of the constitution could not be passed on by the legislature to the president.
The difficulty with this doctrine, however, is that from the outset it was honored more in the breach than in the observance. The constitution of Massachusetts, which contained Adams' absolute interdict, also gave the governor a veto over legislation that could be overridden only by a two-thirds vote of the General Court. In other words, the governor of Massachusetts exercised immense “legislative” power. Elsewhere in the same document there was a provision that a number of “executive” officers (by our definition) would be “chosen annually by joint ballot of the senators and representatives in one room.” All judicial appointments had to be approved by the Council, which was a curious hybrid of executive, legislative, and judicial powers chosen by joint ballot of the two houses. In sum, the Massachusetts paradigm of the separation of powers on close examination is a shambles of interlocking powers and overlapping jurisdictions.
Yet, if we examine Adams' handiwork rather than his rhetoric, we discover a principle of separation founded on the proposition that the executive, legislative, and judicial institutions should have autonomous constituencies. The governor was to be elected annually by the people as a whole; the legislature by geographical subdivisions of the commonwealth; and the judiciary was to hold tenure for life on good behavior. Adams was not, in other words, interested in separating powers in terms of their substantive content (executive, judicial, legislative) but divided authority among discrete agencies (governor, General Court, judiciary, Council), each of which exercised judicial, executive, and legislative jurisdictions. Conflict among these quasi-autonomous power centers, he believed, would prevent the growth of any centralized autocracy. The separation of powers, then, rested on political physics, not metaphysics.
The original Madison draft of the constitution, which served as the basis for discussion and modification at the convention, contained no trace of the separation of powers. All power was vested in a supreme legislature; the upper house was picked by the lower house; the president and judges were selected by both houses. Gradually over the summer of 1787 this centralist model was weakened, over the militant objections of Madison, Hamilton, and James Wilson, and in an ad hoc fashion the “separation of powers” (like “federalism”) emerged from the compromises. Later, in the 47th Federalist, Madison observed that “the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny” (Hamilton et al. [1788] 1961, p. 324). Later in the same essay he adopted John Adams' operational model, noting that the separation of powers did not mean that the “departments ought to have no partial agency in, or no controul over the acts of each other. [Montesquieu's] meaning, … can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution, are subverted” (ibid., pp. 325–326).
Historically speaking, the doctrine of the separation of powers entered American constitutionalism as a fairly simple and matter-of-fact division of the agencies of the national government rather than as a subtle effort to differentiate powers in terms of their innate characteristics. The president exercised judicial power (pardons) and legislative power (the veto); the legislature undertook executive functions (approval of appointments, treaties) and judicial functions (amnesties); and the courts to a lesser degree dabbled in executive and legislative activities. Moreover, there is no empirical evidence to suggest that the maxim about delegated power not being subject to further delegation had any standing: the statutes of the first 20 years of the republic are full of laws delegating national authority to state institutions; state courts, for instance, were given the power to naturalize aliens and to handle a number of offenses against the laws of the United States.
There were a number of disputes in the early nineteenth century that touched marginally on the doctrine of the separation of powers. President Jackson, for example, justified his employment of the veto on policy grounds (his predecessors had felt that the veto should be reserved for legislation the chief executive believed to be unconstitutional) by asserting the full autonomy of the presidency. And, of course, a similar concept of institutional independence underlay Chief Justice Marshall's exercise of judicial review over acts of Congress. But a careful search of the precedents suggests that the separation of powers, although it occupied an honored position in the polemical literature, was not articulated as a serious principle of constitutional interpretation until the 1850s, when Justice Benjamin Curtis invoked it in two leading decisions.
Denying the practice of 60 years, Curtis asserted in Cooley v. Board of Wardens of Port of Philadelphia (53 U.S. 299, 1851) that “if the States were divested of the power to legislate on [interstate and foreign commerce] by the grant of the commercial power to Congress… Congress cannot regrant, or in any manner reconvey to the States that power.” Suddenly delegata potestas non potest delegari attained constitutional status—and by ipse dixit: Curtis did not linger to justify his pronouncement. Nor did the justice stipulate the precise constitutional foundation for his views. Further reflection presumably indicated to him that a violation of the separation of powers fell afoul of the due-process clause of the fifth amendment; at least this was the thrust of his presentation in Murray's Lessee et al. v. Hoboken Land and Improvement Co. (59 U.S. 272, 1855). Ignoring Adams' model, Curtis attempted to define the separation of powers in terms of substance; embarking on an elaborate gloss on the nature of judicial authority, he rejected the time-honored operational definition of judicial power as that power exercised by judges.
It would be pointless to catalogue the subsequent instances where the separation of powers turned up as a ratio decidendi in Supreme Court litigation. What is important is to note that this doctrine became a major theoretical roadblock to the development of administrative law, regulatory commissions, and delegations of emergency authority to the president. The nub of the argument was that Congress could not delegate “legislative” or “judicial” power to administrative officers (whether located in the executive branch or in the so-called independent regulatory commissions)—a contention which, if accepted by the Court, would have destroyed the whole regulatory apparatus that developed in the wake of the industrial revolution and the growth of a national economy. An agency such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, for example, clearly fuses executive, legislative, and judicial power: it administers, it makes rules, and it engages in enforcement.
The Supreme Court, however, was seldom prepared to fortify this high ground. Instead, the justices devised various escape mechanisms from the logical chains of separation doctrine: on one hand, they found that the powers exercised by administrative bodies were not legislative and judicial, but “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” (see Rathbun v. United States, 295 U.S. 602, 1935); on the other, they held that when Congress delegated authority to various administrative instruments, this did not constitute delegation of “legislative power” if meticulous standards of administration were specified (see J. W. Hampton Co. v. U.S., 276 U.S. 394, 1928)—it was merely an implementation of legislative power (Cushman 1941). Indeed, in 1934 the leading authority on the question, Edward S. Corwin, declared the doctrine of the separation of powers moribund (1934, p. 145).
Ironically, in 1935 the corpse arose from its bed and provided the Supreme Court with the basis for striking down the Oil Code promulgated under the National Industrial Recovery Act (Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 539, 1934) and for several other subsequent judicial forays against the evils of the New Deal. But later decisions by the “Roosevelt Court,” notably that reached in U.S. v. Rock Royal cooperative, Inc. (307 U.S. 533, 1939), seem to have put this tumultuous spirit finally to rest. The closest the Supreme Court came to a separation-of-powers ruling in the years since 1941 was in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (354 U.S. 234, 1957), when Chief Justice Warren, while denying the applicability of the separation of powers, seemed to suggest that New Hampshire had violated due process of law by delegating to its attorney general plenary authority to act as a subcommittee of the state legislature.
To conclude, the separation of powers is thus back where it began in 1789 as an abstract affirmation of the independent constitutional existence of the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. And the notion that delegated power can not be further delegated has been demolished by constitutional logic drawn from John Marshall: that congressional power where it exists is plenary, and that plenary jurisdiction includes the power to give power away. Limits on delegation do exist, but they are political, not constitutional, in character (Roche [1952–1963] 1964, pp. 127–161).
John P. Roche
[Directly related are the entriesFederalism; Presidential government. Other relevant material may be found inCentralization and decentralization; Delegation of powers.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Assembly 1955 The Forty-eight States: Their Tasks as Policy Makers and Administrators. New York: Columbia Univ., School of Business.
Bowie, Robert R.; and Friedrich, Carl J. (editors) 1954 Studies in Federalism. Boston: Little.
Calhoun, John C. (1851) 1953 A Disquisition on Government, and Selections From the Discourse. New York: Liberal Arts Press. ? Published posthumously.
Carpenter, William S. 1928 Separation of Powers in the Eighteenth Century. American Political Science Review 22:32–44.
Corwin, Edward S. 1934 The Twilight of the Supreme Court: A History of Our Constitutional Theory. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.
Corwin, Edward S. (1936) 1962 The Commerce Power Versus States Rights. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.
Corwin, Edward S. (1938) 1957 Court Over Constitution: A Study of Judicial Review as an Instrument of Popular Government. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.
Corwin, Edward S. (1941) 1946 Constitutional Revolution, Ltd. Claremont, Calif.: Pomona College.
Cushman, Robert E. 1941 The Independent Regulatory Commissions. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Hamilton, Alexander; Madison, James; and Jay, John (1788) 1961 The Federalist. Edited with introduction and notes by Jacob E. Cooke. Middletown, Conn.: Wesley an Univ, Press.
Levy, Leonard W. 1963 Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Locke, John (1690) 1964 The Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government. Pages 283–446 in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge Univ. Press.
McLaughlin, Andrew C, 1932 Foundations of American Constitutionalism. New York Univ. Press. ? A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Fawcett.
Macmahon, Arthur W, (editor) (1955) 1962 Federalism: Mature and Emergent. New York: Russell.
McWhinney, Edward 1962 Comparative Federalism: States' Rights and National Power. Univ. of Toronto Press.
Montesquieu, Charles L. (1748) 1962 The Spirit of the Laws. 2 vols. New York: Hafner. ? First published in French.
Pollock, Frederick; and Maitland, Frederic W. (1895) 1952 The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I. 2 vols., 2d ed. Boston: Little.
Riker, William H. 1964 Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance. Boston: Little.
Roche, John P. (1952–1963) 1964 Shadow and Substance: Essays on the Theory and Structure of Politics. New York: Macmillan.
Sharp, Malcolm P. 1935 The Classical American Doctrine of “the Separation of Powers.” University of Chicago Law Review 2:385–436.
Wheare, Kenneth C. (1946) 1964 Federal Government. 4th ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Wright, Benjamin F. 1933 Origins of the Separation of Powers in America. Economica 13:169–185.
III CIVIL LIBERTIES
”Civil liberties,” as commonly used, is not a technical, precise term but a loose one denoting the personal rights and freedoms that are—or ought to be—respected by government. The phrase is not quite so broad as “liberty.” It does not apply to the freedom of Robinson Crusoe on his island, where there was no government; it does not embrace those areas of private option where the law can play no part, as when a man freely chooses to be a fool, or a gentleman, or a knave; nor can the term be used very meaningfully in connection with such a concept as the “right of revolution,” which is by nature a nonlegal privilege. But in its broadest usage the term is applicable to all those many claims of right that involve an actual or potential legal nexus between the individual and government. However, lately, especially in the United States, there has been some tendency to single out “civil rights” (the protection of minorities) as a separate category and to use “civil liberties” to describe all other claims of personal right. The distinction is not entirely stable, but it has the merit of subdividing an almost impossibly multifarious subject, and in the discussion that follows “civil liberties” is used in this somewhat narrower sense.
Even within these defined limitations the subject is very extensive, and further problems of definition and classification remain. It is evident that civil liberty can be thought of either negatively, as the individual's right not to have something done to him, or positively, as his right to have something done for him—for example, as the right against state interference with the publication of a political pamphlet or as the right to be provided with the facilities for publishing it. The negative category is the traditional one, and it will command the lion's share of attention in this article. But the truism that underlies the idea of positive liberty should not be overlooked: the freedom to read is meaningless if no books are available. Negative liberties can themselves be further subdivided into rights against interference by government and rights against interference by private individuals or groups. Again the former category is the more traditional, but again the less orthodox view merits a word by way of emphasis. In order to be really free to speak, a street-corner orator may need not only the assurance that the police will leave him alone but also the assurance that they will protect him from the angry reactions of his audience, that the state will “hinder hindrances” to his freedom (see Table 1).
Rights against government are sometimes still further divided into three types: political rights (those bearing on the political process, such as the right to vote or to engage in political controversy), economic rights (such as entrepreneurial freedom or the right to practice a profession), and private rights (which is a catch-all term meant to cover all rights that are neither political nor economic). Obviously these are imperfect categories, since they are not always mutually exclusive (is freedom of artistic expression a private right, or can it be said to bear indirectly on the political process?), but they do represent distinctions that have been drawn in practice and in the literature, and they have, therefore, a loose pragmatic value.
Finally, each of these three classes of rights against government subsumes two kinds of rights, the “substantive” and the “procedural.” The substantive civil liberties are those regarded, in some degree, as ends in themselves; procedural rights are those having to do with the way in which government must proceed in dealing with substantive liberties.
Rise of the modern concept
Some concept of civil liberty can be traced far back into European history. Athenians of the age of Pericles gloried in their freedom of discussion and in their right to participate in public decisions. In the Middle Ages the feudal order rested heavily on the idea of legal rights that even the greatest lord was bound to respect, always in theory and often in fact. The barons who wrung the Magna Charta from King John were not, as they saw it, claiming new privileges but demanding that traditional immunities be reconfirmed. Nevertheless, the modern concept, although related to these older forms, is different enough to be regarded as a new species. In the Greek city-state freedom was a matter not so much of private right as of public good: the individual's liberty was instrumental to and defined by the welfare of the city. And in both the Greek and the medieval understanding men held their rights by virtue of their status rather than by virtue of their manhood. The freedom of
the Greek citizen did not extend to noncitizens, and the feudal vassal enjoyed the rights associated with his rank and order and was obliged, of course, to perform reciprocal duties. The dominant modern idea acknowledges a realm of personal value that is a good in itself, quite apart from the welfare of the community, and with some exceptions it assumes that rights accrue to men because they are men and not because of their status or their performance.
This idea, indeed, also finds some antecedents in premodern times; it smacks of the viewpoint that penetrated Roman law by way of the Stoics and Cicero. But in modern history the idea was given a new and irresistible thrust by the Reformation, which fostered a belief in individualism, and by the rise of capitalism, which provided that belief with the indispensable support of the nascent bourgeoisie. At various times since the seventeenth century, historical forces have emphasized one or another of the classes of civil liberties described in the opening paragraphs above. At first the main thrust was for freedom from the private power of the nobles and others who monopolized trade and restrained its development; this antifeudal movement supported a strengthened monarchy and a unified nation-state. Then, as the stronger monarch himself became a threat, the partisans of freedom sought to curb the state authority he embodied, first by demanding that his agents, judicial and administrative, respect certain procedural limitations when enforcing his will, then by claiming political rights that challenged his monopoly of state powers. The latter movement gathered force in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reached a climax in the American and French revolutions. Its full implications have not been realized even to the present day, but under its impetus governmental power in western Europe and in North America tended gradually to devolve from the monarch to an oligarchy and finally to the majority of the populace. As this development proceeded it became apparent that political rights, although vital, were not enough: the majority, like the monarch, might use state power for good or ill. One result of this realization was a re-emphasis of substantive rights, a re-emphasis that began in the nineteenth century with an increased demand for economic freedom and shifted in the twentieth century to a new concern for other rights against government. This shift was accelerated by the spectacle of the “totalitarian” systems that arose in Europe after World War I. Another result was the development of the concept of positive liberty— “freedom for” rather than “freedom from”—which in some modern systems is regarded as a supplement to, and in others as a substitute for, the negative view of civil liberty.
Problems of conflicting liberties
Although, as has been said, different concepts of civil liberty have been emphasized at different times in the Western world, in general the development has also been cumulative—that is, the shift to a new emphasis has seldom led to an explicit repudiation of the old. The result is that most modern states at least profess to respect nearly the whole vast and sometimes bewildering congeries of civil liberties that has been described. Evidently this profession creates problems, not the least of which arises from the fact that these heterogeneous liberties may conflict with one another. If government undertakes to ensure positive rights—for example, the right to an adequately paid job—it must assume broad authority to control the economic order, and a government thus endowed with powers may use them to encroach not only on economic liberty but on liberty in general. In the communist world this dilemma has been more or less frankly resolved by the subordination of even such rights as free speech and fair trial to the cause of “strengthening the socialist system.” In the West peoples have tried, with varying success, both to enjoy the “welfare state” and to maintain private and political freedom, although the range of economic freedom from public control has certainly contracted since the heyday of laissez-faire ideology in the nineteenth century. There is an old and still controversial question whether other rights can survive in a state where economic rights have been thus demoted. So far the evidence suggests a very tentative “yes.” In the United States, for example, the increase in government economic control since 1930 has been accompanied by a growing (although still inadequate) concern for other personal freedoms. But a different answer might have seemed justified in the 1930s, when the twin phenomena of economic depression and fascism dominated the world landscape, and history has perhaps not yet provided enough data so that the book can be closed on this issue.
However, even if the problem of economic liberty is defined away or bypassed, potential conflict between other civil liberties remains a difficulty. The right to comment on public affairs is no doubt essential in any free society, yet if the comment concerns a pending court case, it may impair the right to fair trial, which is equally essential. The religious zealot must be allowed to urge his views, but he may in doing so encroach on the right of others to be let alone, the “right to privacy.” Most discussion of such perplexities has so far been limited to ritualistic advocacy of “freedom” or “order,” categories of little analytic value in this context. There is need for more treatments that recognize and cope with both horns of the dilemma.
Much the same thing can be said about the overarching problem of drawing the line between personal rights and public authority in concrete instances. Because they were struggling against an outright state policy of repression, the historic spokesmen of freedom usually employed the language of exhortation: their declarations took the form of general and often absolutist propositions. Opposition to them, on the other hand, was equally unqualified: liberty was “license,” which in turn was defined as anything the governors wished to proscribe. Such polarization was inevitable in a predominantly authoritarian system, and exhortation will always have its uses. But in states whose governments are committed to recognizing a range of legitimate civil liberty (and this is true today in most states in the noncommunist world), these uses are limited. The problem in such polities is to develop a just and workable reconciliation of two acknowledged goods—personal rights and community need. Hortatory, absolutist generalizations on either side can carry only part of the way to the problem's solution. Indeed, if depended on too much, they may hamper the solution by obscuring the fact that such a solution exists, that both the claims of the individual and the claims of authority must usually be weighed in the scales.
It is arguable that certain personal rights ought to be absolutely immune from state transgression: the “right to believe” has sometimes been so regarded; some procedural immunities, such as the right against forced confession, may fall in the same category. But all legal systems have recognized that at some point most freedoms may be restricted; the difficulty is where and how to set that point so as to admit valid community claims and yet ensure the maximum of personal liberty. The general principle is that government should inhibit freedom only as much as it has to in order to serve important community needs, and various attempts have been made to formulate a rule or a test that would implement this premise. The “clear and present danger” concept (that speech can be restricted only when it threatens an immediate and serious evil) represents one such attempt; the “balancing test” (that speech can be restricted when the state interest in suppression outweighs the private interest in freedom) represents another. But insofar as these “rules” are not merely tautological, they are shorthand phrases for a large number of alternatives that must be considered before a reasonable conclusion is reached—for example, the distinctions between “advocacy” and “incitement,” between “prior restraint” and “subsequent punishment,” between “state convenience” and “state necessity.” It would be desirable to analyze these alternatives in terms of the issues posed by the conflict between various exertions of state power and various kinds of liberty (e.g., an outright prohibition of free speech may raise questions different from those raised by an ordinance that only regulates the time, place, and manner of such speech; freedom of religious utterance and freedom of political advocacy may stand on different grounds).
Although conceptual treatments of the kind discussed above would be useful, they would leave unanswered other very important questions that should not be overlooked. Even if analysis can provide formulas for the reasonable protection of civil liberties, there remain the issues of what conditions are most likely to secure that protection in practice and, more specifically, what constitutional arrangements are most useful in this regard.
Conditions for protection of civil liberties
The first question is really an aspect of a much broader one—what conditions make for a “democratic” or “competitive” political system—and this is an issue too large and complex to be adequately treated here. However, a few contingent suggestions can be ventured. As might be expected, economic abundance in a given society seems to enhance the likelihood that civil freedom will be tolerated: broadly speaking, the more highly developed the country, the less the chance of arbitrary, authoritarian government. Yet this correlation may not be entirely dependable: it has been argued that in the early stages of economic progress a country may be more, rather than less, prone to generate the tensions that lead to authoritarianism. Education is another factor that appears to produce a national milieu favorable to civil liberties. Indeed, studies have found that even within nations the most educated tend to be the most favorable to “democratic values.” But it has been contended that the first steps toward widespread literacy may turn a nation in quite the opposite direction, and the case of Nazi Germany demonstrates that even a high educational level is not enough. Habit and custom also play a part: a well-established tradition of libertarianism tends to perpetuate itself. It has been urged that “pluralism” with respect to economic and social interests conduces to a free polity; certainly a nation sharply divided into two camps (e.g., the rich and the poor) is not likely to be a free one. Scholars have also from time to time argued that such factors as “national character” and “consensus on fundamentals” are determinative, but empirical study so far has not fully confirmed these insights. Finally, it is worth noting that certain political characteristics may affect the matter. Heavy involvement in politics of the military or of religious groups is often unfavorable to civil freedom; a one-party state need not be tyrannical, but it is likely to be. With the proliferation of new nations in modern times, political scientists are finding examples of an almost endless variety of objective circumstances, and further progress can be expected toward systematic understanding of the environmental prerequisites for civil liberty.
Constitutional guarantees
The emergence of new nations should shed brighter light on the constitutional arrangements for civil liberties. The past offers several prescriptions, but two stand out: the British system of parliamentary supremacy, in which civil liberties are preserved by the tradition of governmental self-restraint, and the American system, with a written bill of rights interpreted and enforced by judicial review. The difference is not so sharp as this bare description suggests—in practice Parliament also feels committed to historic written documents, such as the Act of Settlement, and custom plays a part in determining the actual constitutional structure in the United States—but a difference it is nonetheless. In spite of Britain's impressive success in maintaining civil liberties, the device of a written, nominally binding bill of rights has been adopted very widely by modern nations (Israel and some of the states of the British Commonwealth are among the exceptions), and debates on this matter seem rather academic. But questions remain about the content and character of such a statement. What kinds of rights should be included? Should the declaration list “positive rights,” such as the right to employment, which was formally secured by Germany's Weimar constitution and by the Soviet constitution of 1936? Should it include guarantees of rights against private action, such as the right against “abuse of economic power,” which is specified in the constitution of modern West Germany? The difficulty is that such rights are not self-executing; they depend on the willingness of the government to take the positive steps that are necessary to make them real—e.g., to stimulate the economy, or to adopt adequate regulatory measures. It has been argued that such guarantees are useful as statements of aspiration and as admonitions to the governors. Contrariwise, it has been suggested that being legally unenforceable, such merely moral prescriptions may cheapen the whole concept of rights in the minds of both governors and governed.
Even if the bill of rights takes the traditional form of negative restrictions on government, should these restrictions be expressed in general terms (”due process of law,” “freedom of religion”) or should they be spelled out in detail? Should the rights be stated as absolutes (”Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”) or in qualified terms (as in the Nigerian provision that rights may be limited in ways that are reasonably justified in a democratic society)? Should the declaration list all negative rights that seem important (the Weimar constitution protected motherhood and forbade public instruction that hurt the feelings of nonconformist pupils); if not, which rights do merit explicit statement? Common sense and past experience suggest tentative answers to such questions; further observation and future experience should bring more enlightenment.
Finally, supposing a nation's cultural and political environment makes civil liberty plausible and the nature and content of the bill of rights has been determined, how can those rights be best enforced? Probably the primary, and surely an indispensable, agency is an independent judiciary. It is hard to see how civil liberty can be more than an empty promise unless there are courts free to handle claims between persons and to check the arbitrary acts of administrative officials. Whether the judiciary should also be granted the power to enforce the bill of rights against the legislature itself—that is, whether it should exercise the power of judicial review—is an important question discussed elsewhere [seeJudicial process, article onJUDICIAL REVIEW]. A few decades ago many scholars, even in the United States, were skeptical of judicial review, which they felt had been used by the Supreme Court to restrain economic reform rather than to protect the rights of man. Since then that court and, to a lesser extent, the judiciaries of some American states have done more to defend civil liberties than any other agency of American government, and the attitude of scholars has changed accordingly. During the same period there has been a tendency, although not an overwhelming one, for other countries (e.g., the German Federal Republic, Italy, India) to adopt judicial review in some form, and as history proceeds there will be a growing body of evidence on the relation between civil liberties and this once uniquely American institution.
Robert G. McCloskey
[See alsoCivil disobedience; Democracy; Equality; Freedom; Human rights.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chafee, Zechariah Jr. 1941 Free Speech in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? Supersedes Chafee's Freedom of Speech, 1920.
Commager, Henry Steele et al. 1951 Civil Liberties Under Attack. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
Corwin, Edward S. 1948 Liberty Against Government: The Rise, Flowering and Decline of a Famous Juridical Concept. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press.
Cushman, Robert E. 1956 Civil Liberties in the United States: A Guide to Current Problems and Experience. Cornell Studies in Civil Liberty. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.
Emerson, Thomas I.; and Haber, David (1952) 1958 Political and Civil Rights in the United States: A Collection of Legal and Related Materials. 2d ed., 2 vols. Buffalo, N.Y.: Dennis.
Fellman, David 1958 The Defendant's Rights. New York: Holt.
Hobhouse, Leonard T. 1911 Social Evolution and Political Theory. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Kauper, Paul G. 1962 Civil Liberties and the Constitution. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
Meiklejohn, Alexander 1960 Political Freedom: The Constitutional Powers of the People. New York: Harper.
Roche, John P. 1963 The Quest for the Dream: The Development of Civil Rights and Human Relations in Modern America. New York: Macmillan.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1942) 1950 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. 3d ed. New York: Harper; London: Allen & Unwin. ? A paperback edition was published by Harper in 1962.
Stouffer, Samuel A. (1955) 1963 Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties: A Cross-section of the Nation Speaks Its Mind. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith.
IV CIVIL RIGHTS
Although the terms “civil rights” and “civil liberties” are often used interchangeably, when they are differentiated the latter generally denotes the rights of individuals, while the former refers to the constitutional and legal status and treatment of minority groups that are marked off from the majority by race, religion, or national origin. The following illustration will show the difference. In the United States since the end of slavery, there has never been any question about the Negro's equal rights to freedom of religion or freedom of the press—basic civil liberties; at the same time, he could be treated as a member of his race, and not as an individual, with respect to the schools he could attend and the public facilities he could enjoy—basic civil rights. The distinction between the person as an individual and the person as a member of a group has its roots in history, morality, and social psychology. Reinhold Niebuhr noted that
It may be possible, though it is never easy, to establish just relations between individuals within a group purely by moral and rational suasion and accommodation. In inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility. The relations between groups must therefore always be predominantly political rather than ethical, that is, they will be determined by the proportion of power which each group possesses at least as much as by any rational and moral appraisal of the comparative needs and claims of each group. (1932, pp. xxii-xxiii)
While individual and group rights are to be differentiated, it is probably true that there is no chance for the emergence of the latter if the former are denied, so that the struggle for civil liberties must first be won and the fundamental human rights vindicated and secured before minority rights will be recognized. The struggle for civil rights cannot be conducted for those who are yet denied basic human rights.
In the broad sweep of history—though no doubt there have been numerous exceptions—the relations of a dominant majority toward a weak minority group, or of the conqueror toward the defeated enemy, first took the form of total annihilation or of cannibalism; then the form of slavery or total subjection; then the milder yet still severe form of assignment to an inferior caste; then cooperation and equality. Yet in modern times all forms have coexisted: in Nazi Germany the Jewish people were exterminated, in India the Untouchables still suffer because of the caste system, and in the United States the Negroes are moving into full equality. Even in the ancient world, while Aristotle was teaching that non-Hellenic peoples were fit only for slavery, his former pupil, Alexander of Macedon, acted on the principle that Greeks and Persians, victors and vanquished, could associate on the basis of equality and fraternity.
On one hand, one finds everywhere and at all times fear and hatred of the foreigner, the stranger, the man of different color or tongue or beliefs; on the other hand, there is evidence of an effort of the human consciousness to be aware of the universal in all men, of a common bond and a common destiny. “The universal in its true and inclusive sense is a thought,” Hegel said, “that it has cost thousands of years to bring to human consciousness, and that received its full recognition only through the aid of Christianity. The Greeks knew neither God nor man in their true universality” ([1817] 1841, p. 321). This is too sweeping a judgment, for Stoicism of the Hellenistic age taught the ideal of the cosmopolis, or world state, in which all men, Greek and barbarian, urban and rural, would enjoy equality; but it is true that the ideals of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men found their clearest expression in the Hebrew prophets and Christian teachings. In time, Stoic and Biblical ideals became fused in various schools of natural law that dominated political thought in the West down to the nineteenth century. Thus, denial of equality to minority groups could and was challenged in the name of religion or political theory or philosophy. In modern times the denial of equality to religious, racial, and ethnic minorities also assumed ideological and even religious formulations in theories of racial inferiority and in various political ideologies; but with respect to all such formulations, Arnold Toynbee's judgment seems appropriate: “The present vogue of racialism in the West,” he wrote, “however, has really little to do with current scientific hypotheses. A prejudice so strong as this cannot be accounted for by a cause so rational” (1934).
Until World War I one could hardly speak of a struggle for civil rights; one could see only a record of oppressions and persecutions of minority groups. But then came an awakening of nationalism, and, at least in Europe, oppressed nations became independent, and minority religious and ethnic groups within nations were guaranteed their collective rights by constitutions and international treaties. Although these guarantees generally proved ineffective, they were significant for recognizing the moral claims of minorities.
The claims became universal and reached a climax at the end of World War II. First the Indian subcontinent won freedom in 1947, then Indonesia, then in 1957 the Gold Coast (Ghana), in Africa. In 1945, when the United Nations was organized, the white race of Europe and North America dominated the world. The UN Charter was signed by fifty nations. By the 1960s the UN had over 100 members, more than thirty of them new African nations; and the white race had begun to recognize its own minority status. Almost throughout the world there was violence. However, whereas in former centuries what was obvious was the oppressive measures imposed upon minorities by the dominant group, now one saw minority groups resort to violence against what they considered to be oppressive majorities: for example, Turks against Greeks in Cyprus; Kurds against Arabs in Iraq; Negroes against East Indians in British Guiana; Muslims against Hindus in India; and Hindus against Muslims in Pakistan. In some countries, as in Belgium and India, there were struggles over language rights. No minority group was willing to remain in a position of relative inferiority and subjection. In some instances the struggle for civil rights was against a dominant minority, as by Buddhists against Roman Catholics in South Vietnam or by the nine million African Negroes against the three million whites in the Republic of South Africa. Sometimes the struggle for civil rights, as on behalf of the three million Jews in the Soviet Union, was conducted by concerned persons living outside the area (the Jews of Israel and of the West). The pattern, when viewed ecumenically, is extremely complex.
Apart from national emancipation after World War I and the winning of independence by the peoples of Asia and Africa after World War II, the most dramatic developments in the struggle for civil rights have been in India, the United States, and in international organizations. These will be reviewed briefly.
India . More than fifty million Indians were deemed to be Untouchables by birth and were prevented by custom and law from social and religious contact with other Hindus. For decades Mohandas K. Gandhi had led a nonviolent struggle for their equality. When India became a member of the (British) Commonwealth of Nations and adopted a constitution in 1949, the Untouchables won official political, economic, and social equality. This equality affected their status as well as their competitive opportunity, thus striking at the roots of the caste idea of “outcastes.” In guaranteeing the right of equality, the constitution states that the state shall not discriminate against any citizen on account of caste; that no citizen shall, on the ground of caste, be subject to restriction in access to or use of shops, restaurants, public wells, and tanks; and that the practice of untouchability is forbidden. The constitution also guarantees the practice of any calling without restriction and provides that the state shall promote “with special care” the educational and economic interests of “the weaker sections of the people” and shall protect them “from social injustice and all forms of exploitation.” The law grants former Untouchables preferential treatment by the government in jobs and offices and reserves for them educational and professional opportunities.
The struggle for equality has been helped not only by law but also by certain material forces, notably expanding urbanism and industrialism and the growth of transport and communications.
However, factors have developed that tend to perpetuate, and even to strengthen, the caste organization of Indian society: all castes, high and low, have become corporate political bodies that court favor and power, so that elections are fought on caste lines, party tickets tend to be formed on the same bases, and recruitment and promotions reflect caste consciousness. Caste associations have grown in number and strength. At the National Integration Conference in 1961, President Radhakrishnan stated that although caste is ceasing to be a social evil, it has become a political and administrative evil. Caste loyalties are utilized for the purpose of winning elections or getting people into jobs, for exercising some kind of favoritism or nepotism. It is doubtful, however, that untouch-ability is no longer a “social evil,” for the vast majority of the caste, illiterate and economically weak, submit silently to continued discriminations; and in a country where there is substantial unemployment, it is natural that members of the most depressed classes should suffer continued discrimination rather than run the risk of losing their jobs through retaliation and intensified prejudice. In any case, India demonstrates the difficulties involved in establishing civil rights in traditional societies.
United States. The first civil rights challenge in the United States was presented by the Indians. As the white man pushed westward, he demanded more and more of the Indians' land. Congress in 1830 enacted the Indian Removal Act, which was based on the assumption that segregation would end the conflict between the races, as land would be provided for the Indians in western territory and the whites would occupy all of the eastern lands. Coupled with land hunger was the policy of putting Indian cultures and tribal organizations into the “melting pot,” where they would be destroyed, and of converting Indians from hunters and fishermen into farmers and cattlemen. Cultural, social, and economic assimilation would, at the same time, make available much of the “surplus” Indian lands, which consisted of 150 million acres in 1873. The policy was expressed in the General Allotment Act of 1887, called the Dawes Act, under which it was possible to individualize the Indian landholdings and to permit Indians to dispose of the land as they wished. Citizenship could be acquired by Indians as they left their tribes and chose to live among the civilized people. By 1933, two-thirds of the lands held by the Indians in 1887 had been lost.
An act of 1924 gave citizenship to all Indians, but as late as 1956 there were states that denied them the franchise. Other discriminatory practices, some of them required by law or regulation, were prohibited by a 1934 statute. In the same year Congress enacted the Indian Reorganization Act, the most comprehensive law since 1887. Under its terms, Indian landholdings were increased and land conservation measures were introduced; the organization of Indian tribes was reinvigorated, and tribal customs and laws were given dignity and power; liberal credit policies were established to aid the tribes and individual Indians. The law encouraged respect for Indian cultural life and institutions, especially Indian arts and crafts (under an act of 1935).
Government policy in the 1950s reversed the trends and reverted to pre-1934 positions; in 1961, however, there was again a fundamental change in course when the federal government apparently returned to the Indian policies of the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Federal policy thus fluctuates between a desire not to recognize the Indians as in any way differentiated from the rest of the population, and thus not entitled to any special claims or rights, and a desire to afford them an opportunity to develop their own styles of life and to protect them against greed and prejudice. Thus, there is a conflict between total assimilation and cultural pluralism. While the Indian encounters varying degrees of prejudice and discrimination in many parts of the country, his friends continue to debate his future between the poles of integration and disintegration of Indian life and culture.
The Negro presented problems of a different complexity and order, for after emancipation he had to bear the memory, habits, and history of slavery; he had no indigenous culture and tribal life that he wanted to preserve; he could never claim that he once owned all the land. His skin was darker, he originally came from another continent, and he could be counted in the millions; and there were no large reservations where he could make his home—he had to live in close proximity to those who had been his masters.
At the end of the Civil War and after adoption of the thirteenth amendment, which outlawed slavery and peonage, Congress proceeded to ensure equality for the four million freedmen by providing for their “personal liberty, personal security,” and their “free enjoyment” of “immunities and rights.” “Civil rights” began with passage on April 9, 1866, of “An Act to Protect All Persons in the United States in Their Civil Rights, and Furnish the Means of Their Vindication.” Since the act's constitutionality was doubted, two months later Congress passed the fourteenth amendment, which was ratified in 1868. Under its terms, Negroes became citizens of the United States and of the states wherein they resided; the amendment provided, too, that no state shall deprive any person of his life, liberty, or property without due process of law nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. The fifteenth amendment, ratified in 1870, provided that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
To implement these constitutional provisions, Congress, until the end of Reconstruction in 1877, enacted a series of civil rights acts. The most important of them was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, theaters, and other places of public amusement. From the debates on this act in Congress, it is clear that its purpose was to wipe out all the incidents and badges of slavery. In 1883 the Supreme Court held the act unconstitutional on the ground that the statute prohibited racial discrimination by private individuals, while the fourteenth amendment authorized congressional action only to enforce prohibitions on state action. Then in 1896 the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, upheld as constitutional state laws that required racial segregation in public conveyances, on the theory that “separate but equal” facilities were not a denial of equality. This decision was interpreted as extending the cloak of constitutionality to racial segregation in schools, all public buildings and institutions, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations, publicly or privately operated. Racial segregation was the pattern in 17 southern and border states and in the District of Columbia.
The “separate but equal” rule was flagrantly flouted—separation was enforced, but equality was not provided. The schools and other facilities afforded Negroes were patently, and often grossly, inferior; for example, for 1951 the expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance for nine segregated states was $136.73 for white and $74.67 for Negro; and the average salary per member of staff was similarly disproportionate. In 1938, in a case brought by a Negro who sought admission to the law school of the state University of Missouri, and in 1950, in cases involving a Negro student of law at the University of Texas and a Negro graduate student in education at the University of Oklahoma, the Supreme Court questioned the way the “separate but equal” rule was operating and raised serious doubt whether this rule could be used at all in graduate and professional studies without denying the Negroes' constitutional right to equal protection under the fourteenth amendment. In the field of interstate transportation, also, in cases decided in 1946 and 1950, the Supreme Court considerably weakened the constitutional underpinnings of racial segregation. The deathblow to de jure racial segregation came in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (347 U.S. 483), in which the Court unanimously upheld the contention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that segregated public schools are not “equal” and cannot be made “equal.” In subsequent cases the Court outlawed segregation in state colleges and universities, transportation, parks, municipal golf courses, public beaches, and wherever the state participated in a property's maintenance.
Compliance with the mandate to desegregate public facilities was resisted in the 17 affected states, especially with respect to public schools, and particularly in Mississippi and Alabama. Under the banner of “states' rights,” all sorts of devices were resorted to by segregationists to nullify the orders of the federal courts; and the segregation forces attempted to paralyze the NAACP so that it might not continue its legal defense operations in the south.
In 1955 and 1956, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Negro minister, the Negroes of Montgomery, Alabama, engaged in a boycott of the segregated buses in that city. King was a follower of Gandhi and Thoreau in his philosophy of nonviolent resistance to immoral or unconstitutional laws and customs. Three years later, under NAACP leadership, Negro high-school students in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, launched a sit-in demonstration at lunch counters in chain stores to win nonsegregated service. At Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 several Negro college students staged a sit-in at a lunch counter, spontaneously and without organizational support. These instances served as a pattern for what soon became a widespread movement throughout the southern and the border states against segregation in privately owned places of public accommodation. In many cities the sit-in demonstrations were successful; but everywhere in the affected states and cities there was massive resistance, and white extremists often resorted to violence and even murder. The situation was aggravated by attempts made by Negro organizations to induce Negroes to register as voters in places where they were systematically kept off the suffrage rolls.
When it became apparent that the situation had become intolerable, President John F. Kennedy submitted to Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill to outlaw racial segregation in places of public accommodation, to eliminate discrimination in employment, to assure free suffrage to the Negro, and to end discriminatory practices in housing. The bill was based on the assumption that the Supreme Court would overrule or circumvent its decision in the so-called Civil Rights Cases of 1883, just as it had overruled Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in 1954. Congress (following a filibuster in the Senate) passed the bill on July 2, 1964, and it was immediately signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Although Congress had passed civil rights acts in 1957 and 1960, the act of 1964 was the first really significant civil rights breakthrough in Congress since the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
The new federal law was not as necessary in the north as in the south. In 1865 Massachusetts enacted the first state law in the country banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation. By 1900 there were similar statutes in 18 states; by 1960 there were 24. In 1945 New York became the first state to enact a fair employment practice act; by 1960 there were similar laws in 17 states. There was a network of related laws dealing with discrimination in housing and in education. The statutes barred discrimination on account of religion or national origin as well as on account of race or color. Yet the combination of criminal, civil, and administrative remedies provided by this complex of laws did not prevent the rise and spread of de facto racial segregation, especially in the northern urban centers, where Negro ghettos came into being and were enlarged by the Negro migrations from the south. In these ghettos the schools were almost exclusively Negro; the rate of unemployment was substantially higher than it was for white workers; the housing was substandard or constituted a slum area that was a breeding place for crime, delinquency, drug addiction—evils that in turn fostered unemployment, apathy, frustration. Under these circumstances, enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not bring to the Negroes of Harlem and other slum centers in the north promise of a new day, and in the summer of that year there were outbursts of violence in the Negro ghettos in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Rochester, New York; Jersey City, New Jersey; and elsewhere.
These outbreaks of anger against the evils of de facto segregation precipitated two reactions: on the one hand, a white “backlash” against civil rights; on the other hand, a more widespread recognition of the fact that the movement for civil rights must be intimately linked with policies of full employment, greatly improved educational facilities and techniques for all economically underprivileged children, urban redevelopment that would provide better housing and neighborhoods for lower-income groups, and, in general, policies that would cope with the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the modern megalopolis. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the creation, in 1965, of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, headed by the first Negro in the cabinet, were in part responses to civil rights challenges. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a major step toward implementing the fifteenth amendment and promised greater political power for the large masses of Negroes in the southern states.
International arena. The ideas of human dignity, equality, and fundamental human rights are deeply rooted. Numerous passages in the Old Testament command nations not to oppress the alien and the stranger and to protect the poor, the orphan, and the widow. At the same time, the pages of history record “man's inhumanity to man” that has made “countless thousands mourn.” The struggle for equality has been aided by the revolution in travel and communication, and in technology generally, so that men see themselves as being interdependent more than they had ever been before. For example, Negroes in the United States know that the African peoples have won their independence and that their representatives have places of equal dignity and rights in international organizations and meetings; and this phenomenon has brought moral strength to U.S. Negroes, so that they demand, and struggle for, their rights as Americans and as members of the human family.
Lord Acton, in an address in 1877, stated that the “most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities” ([1861–1910] 1948, p. 33). It was not until the twentieth century that official agencies for judgment came into being. Following World War I, as we have noted, there was an attempt to protect some national minorities by trea-ties; the mandates system under the League of Nations should also be noted in this connection. But the international, programmatic promotion of minority protection and human rights in general was undertaken only after World War II. Articles 1 and 55 of the Charter of the United Nations were designed to promote and encourage respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, or religion. UN bodies that work toward this end are the Third Committee of the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, the Human Rights Commission, the Commission on the Status of Women, and the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.
In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a statement of principles to be implemented by subsequent conventions that would be binding on ratifying member states. In December 1965 the Assembly approved the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. An important feature of the convention was the provision that allowed ratifying nations to bind themselves to permit individuals or groups to charge their governments with violations.
Other international organizations that are concerned with these matters are UNESCO, the International Labour Organisation, the European Commission on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Mention may also be made of the International Commission of Jurists and the International League for the Rights of Man.
While the European Convention on Human Rights has established compulsory machinery, the Commission and the Court, for dealing with cases involving violations of human rights, and the International Labour Organisation has established effective machinery for investigation and reports respecting certain areas of human rights, other agencies normally rely on implementation through reporting systems.
The chief utility of the agencies has been to expose to general view the facts of human rights violations and to win support for the claim that there is a universal law of humanity, under which individuals and groups (religious, racial, cultural, and national) should somehow be protected against attempts to destroy (genocide), discriminate against, or humiliate them. What Walter Bagehot called “government by discussion” (1872, chapter 5) has not come into existence in the interational field; yet the open and vigorous discussion of human rights in governmental and non-governmental agencies has done much to make meaningful the preamble to the UN Charter, which proclaims the determination of the nations “to re-affirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small… .”
Thus, a denial of civil rights—whether it takes place in Birmingham, Alabama, or in Birmingham, England, or in the U.S.S.R., or in South Africa, or in Bechuanaland, or in Algeria—is no longer a parochial domestic question, but has become a matter of universal concern, a concern that implies the belief (as stated by Pope John XXIII in Pacem in terris 1963) that human society is founded on the principle that every human being is a person, that his nature is endowed with intelligence and free will, that he has rights that flow directly from his very nature, and that these rights are universal, inviolable, and are such that they cannot in any way be surrendered.
Milton R. Konvitz
[See alsoAssimilation; Human rights; Minorities; Race; Race relations; Segregation.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acton, John E. D. (1861–1910) 1948 Essays on Freedom and Power. Boston: Beacon. ? A paperback edition was published in 1955 by Noonday.
Bagehot, Walter (1872) 1956 Physics and Politics: Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of “Natural Selection” and “Inheritance” to Political Society. Boston: Beacon.
Baldry, H. C. 1965 The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought. Cambridge Univ. Press.
Barron, Milton L. (editor) 1957 American Minorities: A Textbook of Readings in Intergroup Relations. New York: Knopf.
Brooks, Alexander D. 1962 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Civil Liberties Educational Foundation.
Chief Ministers' Conference on National Integration, Delhi 1961 National Integration: Decisions Taken by the Chief Ministers' Conference. New Delhi: Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity.
Collier, John 1947 The Indians of the Americas. New York: Norton. ? An abridged paperback edition was published in 1953 by New American Library.
Epstein, Benjamin R.; and Foster, Arnold 1962 “Some of My Best Friends … .” New York: Farrar, Straus.
Franklin, John H. (1947) 1956 From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes. 2d ed., rev. & enl. New York: Knopf.
Glazer, Nathan; and Moynihan, Daniel P. 1963 Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and the Irish of New York City. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Gordon, Milton M. 1964 Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Gossett, Thomas F. 1963 Race: The History of an Idea in America. Dallas, Texas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press.
Greenberg, Jack 1959 Race Relations and American Law. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Grimes, Alan P. 1964 Equality in America: Religion, Race, and the Urban Majority. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Gumplowicz, Ludwig 1883 Der Rassenkampf: Sociologische Untersuchungen. Innsbruck (Austria): Verlag der Wagner'schen Universitats Buchhandlung. ? Also published in 1893 in French as La lutte des races; Recherches sociologiques.
Handlin, Oscar 1957 Race and Nationality in American Life. Boston: Little.
Handlin, Oscar 1959 The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Handlin, Oscar 1964 Fire-bell in the Night: The Crisis in Civil Rights. Boston: Little.
Harris, Robert J. 1960 The Quest for Equality: The Constitution, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1817) 1841 Werke. Volume 6: Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. 2d ed. Berlin: Duncker. ? Translation of extract in text provided by Milton R. Konvitz.
Kallen, Horace M. 1924 Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples. New York: Liveright.
Konvitz, Milton R. 1946 The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.
Konvitz, Milton R. 1947 The Constitution and Civil Rights. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Konvitz, Milton R. 1953 Civil Rights in Immigration. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.
Konvitz, Milton R. (editor) (1954) 1965 Bill of Rights Reader. 3d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.
Konvitz, Milton R. 1961 A Century of Civil Rights. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
Konvitz, Milton R. 1966 Expanding Liberty: Freedom's Gains in Postwar America. New York: Viking.
Montagu, Ashley (1951) 1952 Statement on Race: An Extended Discussion in Plain Language of the UNESCO Statement by Experts on Race Problems. 2d ed. New York: Schuman.
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Tannenbaum, Frank 1947 Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York: Knopf. ? A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Random House.
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