When World War Two broke out, she was working for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Many constitutional litigants are guilty people who wanted only to escape the consequences of their misdeeds.īut there are also some people who go to court for the Constitution, not for themselves: people like Mitsuye Endo. But it explains why we don’t celebrate them as heroes. Their rights are our rights the guilty, I like to say, are the first line of defense for the innocent. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have rights. Clarence Earl Gideon, whose case extended the right to counsel, was a drifter and a petty crook. Ernesto Miranda, whose case gave us the Miranda warning, was a kidnapper and a rapist. Unsavory individuals stand behind some of our great constitutional decisions. Why don’t we give constitutional litigants the same kind of honor as framers, soldiers, or judges? One reason is that sometimes they’re pretty bad people. These people too fought for our freedoms they too defended our rights. Even more, it leaves out the litigants, the individuals whose cases gave judges the opportunity to interpret the Constitution and the lawyers who pressed their arguments. It omits the activists, people like Martin Luther King, who sought to hold the nation to its constitutional commitments. Last might come the judges, who from the short and spare document the framers wrote have built the edifice of constitutional democracy we inhabit.īut this telling leaves out several categories of people. Then there are the men and women of the armed services, who risked and often sacrificed their lives to ensure that our experiment in self-governance could continue. Who are the heroes of our Constitution? We think, perhaps, first of the framers of that document, men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
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