ABSTRACT
In United States, legislatures cannot modify Constitutional provisions, and formal amendment of the United States Constitution is difficult and infrequent. As a consequence, the Supreme Court is repeatedly under pressure to interpret the Constitution in accordance with policy rather than in strict conformity with the standards of judicial reason. This chapter examines a few of the decisions in which judicial reason seems to have been subordinated to other considerations. The Supreme Court was determined to sustain Congress in its choice of means for ensuring the Negro equal citizenship status in the United States. To the distress of many laymen, the accommodations section of the civil rights bill of 1963 is based on the interstate-commerce power of Congress rather than on the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the Supreme Court was steadily raising the level of the Negro's Constitutional rights, it continued to apply a time-honored formula, and its decisions were accepted as the outcome of an appropriate exercise of the judicial power.
