US I students are presently participating in a series of mini-presentations and discussions about various Supreme Court cases that have had significance in our history. Many of these cases are quite recent (since 1950s) but several go all the way back to the very beginning of this republic. Before we begin looking at the cases, two points we try to make clear are important...first, that the court's decisions reflect the time, and second, that not all decisions are good ones.
Regarding the 1st point, we can not hide from the fact that in our history, we did things that today we are not proud of, but at the time felt were totally justified in doing. Slavery...Japanese internment...segregation... abortion. And so the decisions reflect the attitudes about those ideas, actions, and institutions within the context of the times.
The second point recognizes the human factor of the court justices. They are people and people are flawed of course. So decisions reflect some of that, such as Bakke, perhaps the weakest decision over the past 50 years. Other decisions in the past, Dred Scott comes to mind, were based upon poor thinking and biases, and ended up making for awkward or simply wrong consequences.
So once again, I am back to my standard mantra - "history happened to people" - and because we are not perfect, what we learn is that we are the best nation in the world, we have yet to become and have never been the perfect nation in the world.
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