ABSTRACT
To infuse law with dignity, majesty, and perhaps a touch of mystery, it is customary to make entirely unrealistic claims about the power and authority of the Supreme Court. In a perceptive essay published in 1969, political scientist C. Herman Pritchett explained that the disciplines of law and political science drifted apart for semantic, philosophical, and practical reasons. The proposition that British courts could void an act of Parliament appeared in an opinion by Chief Justice Edward Coke in 1610. Dred Scott, in 1857, helped precipitate the Civil War and led to a constitutional amendment to nullify the Court's opinion. The Supreme Court of Washington in 1980 held that a university police officer had invalidly seized incriminating evidence in a student's dormitory room. The Court bows to the lessons of experience and the force of better reasoning, recognizing that the process of trial and error, so fruitful in the physical sciences, is appropriate also in the judicial function.
