ABSTRACT
The Court's difficulty in dealing with the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and with the phrase "essential fairness" which, and no more than which, the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is said to require of the states is perhaps nowhere better displayed than in the four written opinions offered in Adamson v. California. This chapter examines these opinions as they appear in the Reports in order better to understand the Court's problem. Admiral Dewey Adamson, a citizen of California, was charged with murder in the first degree and with burglary in the first degree; he was tried before Judge Charles W. Fricke and a jury in the Superior Court of California in and for the County of Los Angeles. In due course the case came up and was affirmed by an equally divided Court, with the same division and the same abstention.
