Show Notes
Prohibitions on excessive fines date back at least as far as Magna Carta in 1215, and the U.S. Constitution has barred excessive fines since 1791. But the Supreme Court has only recently begun to interpret what the Excessive Fines Clause means, and it wasn't until 2019 that the Court said the Clause applies to the states.
On this episode: the story of how the Supreme Court finally began to incorporate the Bill of Rights rights against the states and the history of excessive fines.
More from Bound By Oath by IJ
In 1966, Los Angeles officials tried to put a man in prison for handing out leaflets in protest of a fatal police shooting. Today, we know the case as Younger v. Harris, which kicked off the doctrine of Younger abstention, the bane of many a civil rights plaintiff. On this episode, we examine the origins, the impact, and the relentless expansion of the doctrine.
On this episode, we recover a lost part of the Fourth Amendment that the Supreme Court essentially erased in 1960. In the case of Jones v. United States, the Court ignored text, history, and tradition, and disfigured the Warrant Clause, allowing law enforcement to knock down doors based on mere hearsay and with scant consequences for lying or mistakes. Jones was wrong the day it was decided, and the Court should overturn it.
On this episode: the story of Pullman abstention, the first of several abstention doctrines the Supreme Court invented to let federal judges decline to decide cases that they have jurisdiction to decide.
Next week, the Supreme Court is going to hear a huge civil rights case that no one is talking about—because the legal issue before the Court is the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, an obscure and slightly treasonous doctrine that lets federal judges throw worthy cases out of court without reaching the merits.
In our final episode of the season, we head to Indian Country and survey several strands of Supreme Court precedent that prevent Native Americans from putting their property to peaceful and productive use.