Where’s My Constitution?

“The public welfare demands that Constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself and not according to judges’ view of fairness, reasonableness or justice.”

 

Justice Hugo Black

“Where’s my Constitution?” Justice Black asked, ruffling through his pockets and spreading out the papers on his desk.

“I always keep my Constitution in my coat pocket. What could have happened to it? Have you got one on you?” he asked of a visitor a few years ago.

“You ought to keep one on you all the time,” he said, buzzing for his secretary. “Where’s my Constitution?”

The woman searched his desk drawers and scanned the library shelves in the spacious Supreme Court chambers, but found no Constitution.

“I like to read what it says. I like to read the words of the Constitution,” Justice Black said in a slight Southern drawl, after dispatching the secretary to fetch one. “I’m a literalist, I admit it. It’s a bad word these days, I know, but that’s what I am.”

Shortly, the Constitution was delivered. Hugo LaFayette Black, then 81 years old and completing his 30th year on the United States Supreme Court, laid it tenderly on his lap and opened it to the Bill of Rights.

“Now,” he said with a warm smile, “now let’s see what it says.”

Perhaps as well as anything else, the incident illustrated what formed Chief Justice Earl Warren called the “unflagging devotion” of Mr. Black to the Constitution of the United States.

Perhaps no other man in the history of the Court so revered the Constitution as a source of the free and good life. Few articulated so lucidly, simply and forcefully a philosophy of the 18th- century document. Less than a handful had the impact on constitutional law and the quality of the nation as this self-described “backward country fellow” from Clay County, Alabama.

“I believe that our Constitution,” Justice Black once said, “with its absolute guarantee of individual rights, is the best hope for the aspirations of freedom which men share everywhere.”

Read More about Justice Black:
https://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0227.html