Legal History Commons^™

Justice-As-Fairness As Judicial Guiding Principle: Remembering John Rawls And The Warren Court, Michael Anthony Lawrence

Michael Anthony Lawrence

This Article looks back to the United States Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during the years 1953-1969 when Earl Warren served as Chief Justice, a period marked by numerous landmark rulings in the areas of racial justice, criminal procedure, reproductive autonomy, First Amendment freedom of speech, association and religion, voting rights, and more. The Article further discusses the constitutional bases for the Warren Court’s decisions, principally the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due process clauses.

The Article explains that the Warren Court’s equity-based jurisprudence closely resembles, at its root, the “justice-as-fairness” approach promoted in John Rawls’s monumental 1971 work, A Theory of …

Trading Police For Soldiers: Has The Posse Comitatus Act Helped Militarize Our Police And Set The Stage For More Fergusons?, Arthur Rizer

Arthur L. Rizer III

The recent protests, police overreaction, and subsequent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrated to Americans and to the world the true extent of the militarization of police in communities across the United States. Deployed throughout Ferguson, in preemption and then in response to protesters’ actions, were ranks of heavily armed, flak-jacketed, camouflage uniformed police standing atop and around armored personnel carriers with machine guns mounted. Such a response evidences that the line between police and soldiers in communities is blurring, if not blurred. This militarization is, in part, a result of a principle Americans have held dear since our founding, that …