John Harrison

The Power of Congress over the Rules of Precedent

In the Passenger Cases Chief Justice Taney expressed his willingness always to reconsider his Court’s constitutional doctrines. In Dickerson v. United States the Court declined to do as Chief Justice Taney said he would have done and adhered to Miranda v. Arizona without saying whether a majority of the Justices believed Miranda to have been correctly decided as an original matter. Suppose that some time between the Taney and Rehnquist Courts Congress had adopted a statute purporting to codify Chief Justice Taney’s suggestion by providing that the Supreme Court shall depart from its precedents whenever it believes them to be incorrect.

The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts and the Text of Article III

SECTION 1. The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

Time, Change, and the Constitution

HE future is hard to predict and thus hard to control. A striking example of this principle in the context of Brown v. Board of Education involves one of the central participants in that case, Justice Stanley Reed. According to some accounts, a few years after Brown was decided Justice Reed had some health troubles and was advised by his doctors that his long-term outlook was not good. In response to that advice, and possibly in order to spend what little time remained to him as pleasantly as possible, he resigned from the Supreme Court in 1957 after nineteen years of service. T