Geoffrey Stone: The 2016 Election And The Future Of Constitutional Law

The 2016 Election And The Future Of Constitutional Law

NOTE: I wrote this on Tuesday afternoon.

I entered law school in the fall of 1968. It was still the heyday of the Warren Court. Many members of my generation chose law school in no small part because we were inspired by the extraordinary achievements of the Warren Court. With its decisions on racial segregation, voting rights, criminal justice, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right of privacy, and a host of other issues, the Warren Court had transformed constitutional law.

To cite just a few examples:

in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Court held racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional;

in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) it held that evidence obtained in an unconstitutional search must be excluded when offered by the government against the victim of the unconstitutional search;

in Engel v. Vitale (1962) it held school prayer unconstitutional;

in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) it held that indigent criminal defendants have a constitutional right to court-appointed counsel;

Read more at Huffington Post