Prompt 2: The Supreme Court is not an effective, counter-majoritarian protector of the rights of oppressed minority populations in society when fundamental rights are at stake. However, rather than serving as an end-all-be-all and strict law of the land, the court’s decisions have often taken a considerable amount of time to enforce and come into place. Rather than being a protector of the rights, it is wiser to look at the court as an impetus for change. This is not to undermine the extraordinary power that the court has, but instead look at their power from a different angle. In a history of civil and human rights issues and movements, the court has not served as a protector or an enforcer, because of the time it tends to take after their
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They have the power to interpret laws and their meanings in certain contexts, but after they make a decision, it is not up to them whether or not it is enforced. The enforcers come in the the way of lower level judiciary branches, police forces, and other people who are able to carry out what the Supreme Court has decided would be the law of the land. This is the structure upon which the entire judicial system in the United States is based upon. There are only nine Supreme Court justices, and it would be impossible for those justices to literally be “protectors” of the rights that they deem are inalienable. One’s opinion on the statement is entirely based upon their interpretation of the word “protector” and while the court is able to tell the actual protectors what to protect, they do not say how and it is difficult to regulate how those actual protectors go about their …show more content…
Roe v. Wade was a case in 1973 that accentuated and brought a large importance to the trimester categorization of a pregnancy, and legalized abortions country-wide in the first trimester. It also declared that states could regulate abortions in the second trimester if there is potential harm to the woman, and in the third trimester, states could decide to wholly outlaw abortion except to save the life of the mother. They made this decision based upon the “right to privacy” clause in the 14th amendment. This was a monumental decision in preserving the rights of women and their bodies, as well as their privacy. The public reaction to the Court’s decision was incredibly split, and further formed the two main sides that exist on the issue today: “pro-choice” and “pro-life”. There will likely continue to be an ongoing debate as long as the two sides are so starkly different, and there will always be protests as long as there is no clear definitive way of knowing when a fetus actually begins to be a human life. The abortion-rights movement may have still happened and been successful in the absence of Roe v. Wade., but it is difficult to see a way in which a broader expansion of rights would have been possible. For many years, women did not have the option of receiving an abortion, and the fact that they do now is a step in the right direction towards
They have the power to interpret laws and their meanings in certain contexts, but after they make a decision, it is not up to them whether or not it is enforced. The enforcers come in the the way of lower level judiciary branches, police forces, and other people who are able to carry out what the Supreme Court has decided would be the law of the land. This is the structure upon which the entire judicial system in the United States is based upon. There are only nine Supreme Court justices, and it would be impossible for those justices to literally be “protectors” of the rights that they deem are inalienable. One’s opinion on the statement is entirely based upon their interpretation of the word “protector” and while the court is able to tell the actual protectors what to protect, they do not say how and it is difficult to regulate how those actual protectors go about their …show more content…
Roe v. Wade was a case in 1973 that accentuated and brought a large importance to the trimester categorization of a pregnancy, and legalized abortions country-wide in the first trimester. It also declared that states could regulate abortions in the second trimester if there is potential harm to the woman, and in the third trimester, states could decide to wholly outlaw abortion except to save the life of the mother. They made this decision based upon the “right to privacy” clause in the 14th amendment. This was a monumental decision in preserving the rights of women and their bodies, as well as their privacy. The public reaction to the Court’s decision was incredibly split, and further formed the two main sides that exist on the issue today: “pro-choice” and “pro-life”. There will likely continue to be an ongoing debate as long as the two sides are so starkly different, and there will always be protests as long as there is no clear definitive way of knowing when a fetus actually begins to be a human life. The abortion-rights movement may have still happened and been successful in the absence of Roe v. Wade., but it is difficult to see a way in which a broader expansion of rights would have been possible. For many years, women did not have the option of receiving an abortion, and the fact that they do now is a step in the right direction towards