ABSTRACT

The United States has made two distinctive contributions to the science of politics: the ideas of a written Constitution as the basic charter for government and of a life-tenured judiciary as the interpreter of the constitutional guarantees. The United States is also distinctive in another way: It is the longest continuously functioning democracy in the western hemisphere. The United States Constitution itself endorses this conception, most explicitly in the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to all persons; and this democratic principle applies to all laws, not simply to a few particular circumstances specifically intended by the authors of the Constitution. The United States Supreme Court served as a vivid reminder of this fundamental democratic principle at a crucial early moment in our national history -- in a way that, in particular, has a suggestive parallel in recent Chilean and Argentinean experience.