A Few of the Most Interesting Parts of The US Constitution
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- Опубликовано: 22 июл 2020
- This is a lecture video about the supreme law if the United States of America. In it, I discuss the part where Senators were elected by state legislators, where slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a person, and where the Supreme Court was never given the power of judicial review. This is part of a Philosophy of Law course.
Thank you, sir. I have watched all the episodes of Philosophy of Law, and I hope you will explain Hans Kelson and Joseph Raz.
I've really enjoyed this series so far. Thanks
This video is criminally under-liked!
A very interesting semantic study.
An excellent exposé. Thanks.
love these lectures! Such a great teacher/professor
I really don't like the 'seconday' vs 'primary' distinction. The rules about who makes the rules are logically primary and the rules that apply directly to people are secondary.
It is debatable whether or not the change to popular election of Senators with Amendment XVII was a net benefit to the country.
Regarding Article 3 and judicial review
Every member of all government swears an oath to the constitution. As such, one could argue that the power to review all government action is implicit. In fact, all members of government, at all levels, and in all branches, are duty bound to nullify unconstitutional government actions and laws.
Regarding Article 1 Section 2
All legitimate powers held by government are delegated by sovereign individuals based on their inalienable rights over other sovereign individuals. If a sovereign does not have an inalienable right to do something to another sovereign, then it cannot be delegated to government. If government claims to have such non delegable authority, it is illegitimate and blatant tyranny/usurpation.
Some would say that individuals never are and never have been sovereign; that rights are never truly inalienable; and that legitimate government powers are aggregated from citizens collectively rather than delegated by them individually. It would seem that in your view governments cannot have 'legitimate' power to create laws, demand taxes, imprison criminals and so on, since none of those are legitimate activities (let alone inalienable rights) of individual citizens. But quite the opposite, America's own Declaration of Independence states that within the overarching framework of protecting individual "unalienable" rights, people are or should be free to structure their government more or less as they see fit:
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
In that framework slavery and Article 1 Section 2 were fundamentally wrong both because they violated fundamental rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and because they were not established according to the consent of the governed (ie slaves etc. had no democratic voice). By contrast taxation and so on do not violate fundamental rights, and to the extent that they limit mere social rights such as property they are nevertheless justified in terms of consent of the governed.
@@mithrae4525 “Some” people say many ludicrous things and believe in many superstitions holding asinine beliefs not rooted in first principles. Man existed before government, and as sovereign individuals are endowed with the inalienable right to resist tyranny, and live. Their power exists because they exist. Government is a construct of man. Man can exist without government but government cannot exist without man. You either stand for the inalienable rights of all men, or no man will have rights. You should remember this when chaos ensues and the hoards of tyrants snatch you from your bed some night and beat you to death because you were too stupid to think critically about the rights of individuals to resist tyranny.
The so-called three-fifths compromise is widely misunderstood by modern readers. What it actually did was to limit the power of the slave states, because had the entire populations of slaves been counted for the purposes of apportionment, the slave states would thereby have had many more seats in the legislature. The populations of enslaved people in the slave states were a huge proportion of the total population-in 1790 making up more than 1/3 the total population of the South-but those enslaved were not granted any power to vote or hold office, so counting slaves as full people would have resulted in that many more white men in office. The compromise was necessary, because had the slave populations not been counted, at all, the slave states would simply have refused the ratify the Constitution, and if the slave populations has been counted fully, the free states would have refused to ratify the Constitution.
Now, one can certainly argue that perhaps the Constitution should never have been ratified, and that is certainly an opinion one can hold, but it is a not an opinion which is relevant to the actual history, and no one can say how much longer slavery would have persisted without it. Additionally, it needs to be recognized that Madison and the other Framers very specifically did not use the word "slavery" anywhere in the Constitution, precisely so that it could not later be used as evidence that the Constitution permitted slavery. Lysander Spooner famously wrote an entire book on this subject, called "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery" (1845), in which he argues correctly that the Constitution does not permit slavery.
And don't come at me with how the UK banned slavery in 1832, because they only did so by paying 20 million Pounds Sterling to slaveholders as compensation, which amounted to about 40% of the entire budget of His Majesty's Government, and is equivalent to nearly 20 billion GBP, today. A massive amount of debt was incurred to pay that bill, debt which wasn't fully repaid until 2015. The list of beneficiaries of that payment, none of which was made to any enslaved person, lies at the root of the family fortunes of most of Britain's richest families, today.
Whatever else we can say about the Constitution, we can say clearly that the slave states entered into the Constitution fully aware and knowing that the intent of the Constitution was to eventually eliminate the practice of slavery. This is obvious from the text of Article I, Section 9, which states that no laws prohibiting the admission of people to the states would be entertained before 1808, and on the very first day of 1808 (actually, it was passed in the Senate on December 17, 1805, passed in the House on February 13, 1807, and signed by President Jefferson on March 2, 1807, to take effect January 1, 1808) that was exactly what they did-ban the further importation of slaves. This history is quite clear that the slaves states went into this knowing full well what the future held.
It's also important to note that the "Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves" of 1807 was NOT the first law Congress passed to restrict the slave trade. That was in 1794, the Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited US ships from participating in the slave trade. And it should also be noted that the penalties for violating these laws were extremely stiff, even by the standards of the era.
This an excellent comment
teach, do you right backwards cause you learned to write in hebrew?
Although the Constitution does not explicitly grant the power of judicial review to the courts, it was widely understood in the Founding Era that in the common law tradition we inherited from England, judicial review was an assumed part of the duties of courts of law. It's not at all accurate to say that the SCOTUS "gave itself" that power.
So this guy is just going to point to the antiquated provisions in the plain text of the Constitution that were amended and tell us these are “interesting?” Okie dokie…
@Drain Bamage Wow! you're really that smart? You're like so smart! Wow! So this stuff bores you? OMG you're smart. Probably the smartest commenter here...
I want to be like you! So, what do I do? Oh. I see. Take the time to watch stuff someone worked hard to create in order to teach us valuable information, and then use my skills and knowledge and time & energy to disparage the creator of the presentation. ok. great!
😅