ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a mildly disruptive observation and mentions the ambiguity of some of the key words that comprise rubrics. The decision, of Supreme Court, was a national disaster, a significant cause of the Civil War and what later Chief Justice Hughes called a "self-inflicted wound" for the Supreme Court as an institution. It was an instance in which the Court had leeway and chose to decide in terms that can only be called grossly anti-democratic, even discounting for the nature of hindsight and the inevitably anachronistic quality at the distance in time. The terror means that the people who have power in the country do not want an effective, independent judiciary essential to the rule of law. And that means there is not a free, democratic society. It is a fundamental principle that an independent judiciary is necessary to a free, democratic society and that there can be no truly independent judiciary where the fundamental principles of limited.
