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The lecture notes are here.

The First Amendment provides:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Section 5 of the 14th Amendment provides:

5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Here are some photographs of the St. Peter the Apostle Church in Boerne, Texas, the subject of City of Boerne v. Flores. I suppose this church makes an exception to the “Though Shalt Not Kill” Commandment for the Religious Freedoms Restoration Act, which met its constitutional demise within the hallowed walls of this house of worship.

These photographs are courtesy of Hanah Volokh.

Here is a map of the Village of Belle Terre in Long (not Staten) Island. Today, roughly 800 people live in Belle Terre. It is close by to the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook (named because there is a brook with stones on campus). I’ve been there.

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And here is a photograph of a sign welcoming you (as long as you don’t have a roommate  to the Village of Belle Terre (courtesy of Ron Talmo):

The lecture notes are here.

Individual Liberty I

• Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1476-1478).
• Buck v. Bell (1428-1432).
• Griswold v. Connecticut (1478-1494).

Pierce v. Society of Sisters

This is the Hill Military Academy, a private school shut down due to the compulsory education law.

Buck v. Bell

This is Carrie Buck. Why was she designated as “feebleminded”? Because she had an “illegitimate child,” and they charged her with “promiscuity.” The pregnancy resulted from a rape.

This is Carrie Buck with her mother, Emma Buck.

This is Dr. J. H. Bell, the superintendent at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics.

This is the  courthouse in Amherst County, Virginia where Buck’s case was first “heard”:

This is the “State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,” where Carrie Buck was sterilized in the wake of Buck v. Bell.

Here is a rendering of Carrie’s Buck family tree, as performed by Dr. Harry H. Laughlin. F stands for “feebleminded.” Notice That Carrie Buck is designated with an F, her mother Emma was designated with an F, and her daughter, Vivienne, was designated with an F. There you have three generations of imbeciles. Enough.

 

Haughlin, impressed that Nazi Germany adopted his ideas, had this to say:

The fact that a great state like the German Republic, which for many centuries has helped furnish the best that science has bred, has in its wisdom seen fit to enact a national eugenic legislative act providing for the sterilization of hereditarily defective persons seems to point the way for an eventual worldwide adoption of this idea.

In 1936, Laughlin was invited by the Nazis to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine at the University of Heidelberg for his work in the “science of racial cleansing.”

 Here is Carrie Buck shortly before she died.

Here are several pieces of American propaganda about Eugenics.

This one says, “Some people are born to be a burden on the rest. Learn about heredity. You can help to correct these conditions.”

This piece of propaganda says “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution.”

Speaking of social darwinism, and surivival of the fittest, here is Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who firmly believed that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Buck’s daughter, Vivian, was raised by foster parents, This is Vivian at 6 months old. She flunked her IQ test. So she was also deemed an imbecile:

It was Estabrook’s habit to photograph the subjects of his eugenical family studies, and one surviving photo shows Alice Dobbs holding Carrie’s baby. It appears that Mrs. Dobbs is holding a coin in front of Vivian’s face in an attempt to catch her attention. The baby looks past her, staring into the distance, apparently failing the test. Estabrook described that moment during his testimony at trial a few days later: “I gave the child the regular mental test for a child of the age of six months, and judging from her reaction to the tests I gave her, I decided she was below the average.”

In case you were wondering, the child was not an imbecile. Here is her report card from first grade. She was a solid B student, with an A in deportment, and on the honor roll.

Vivian died at the age of 8 due to intestinal diseases.

Despite her sterilizations, Buck would go on to be married, twice. First to William Eagle.

25 year after William’s death, Buck married Charlie Deatmore.

Here is Carrie Buck shortly before she died.

Here is a sign in Virginia to commemorate Buck v. Bell.

Griswold v. Connecticut

Here is Estelle Griswold, the lead plaintiff at the Planned Parenthood Center of New Haven, Connecticut.

Here is a photograph of Dr. C. Lee Buxton and Estelle Griswold after their arrest.

A penumbra is a partial shadow outside the complete shadow of an opaque body.

At the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, presumptive-nominee Hillary Clinton promised that she would go “beyond” President Obama’s “executive actions to prevent deportations.”

“I am going to back and support what President Obama has done to protect DREAMers and their families, to use executive action to prevent deportation,” Clinton said to applause. “And I have said that if we cannot get comprehensive immigration reform as we need, and as we should, with a real path to citizenship that will actually grow our economy — then I will go as far as I can, even beyond President Obama, to make sure law-abiding, decent, hard-working people in this country are not ripped away from their families.”

There is a problem here. The OLC Opinion used to justify the legality of DAPA effectively said it would be unconstitutional for the President to expand deferred action any more than he already did. One of the reasons the immigrant-rights community has been so critical of the DAPA memorandum is, that as broad as it is, it is restricting. Most pressingly, it did not provide deferred action to the parents of the dreamers. It did not provide deferred action to aliens without any relationship to a U.S. Citizen. If President Clinton’s OLC wants to go “beyond” the Obama OLC, it will have to repudiate, or at least ignore, portions of the 2014 opinion

On Thursday at noon, Eric Segall and I will be speaking at the Georgia State Federalist Society Chapter about selecting the next Supreme Court Justices. It will be in room 341. Please stop by if you are in the area. It should be interesting.

Back in 2010, I discovered this advertisement for Lochner’s Bakery from the archives of the Oneida County Clerk. I contacted the County Clerk, and asked if they had any records of Lochner’s Bakery. They mailed me back a crooked xerox of an advertisement for the bakery. To my knowledge, no one else has ever used this image. I even watermarked it at the bottom with a credit for the Harlan Institute for Constitutional Studies (as the Harlan Institute was then known).

While watching C-SPAN’s special on Lochner v. New York, I chuckled when they used the same crooked image I found–without permission, or showing the watermark. It’s okay. It is for a good cause.

 

 

Update: I was informed that C-SPAN also contacted the Oneida County Historical Society and paid the same $10 fee that I paid years ago. I’m glad they did their homework too!