The Supreme Court's Bill of Attainder Doctrine: A Need for Clarification
1966; UC Berkeley School of Law; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3479153
ISSN1942-6542
Autores Tópico(s)Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems
ResumoIt is all very pleasant to say that the remedy for bad laws lies with the people at the polls, but what Senators or Representatives were ever defeated because they voted for a sedition law? ....If legislators are determined not to be guardians of the liberties of the people and if judges refuse to interfere when legislators take those liberties away, what is the use of putting guarantees of fundamental rights into the Constitution except, perhaps, to furnish political orators with noble words to quote while they tell us Americans to thank God that we are not as other men are?'Professor Chafee wrote the above to protest the threat to personal liberties posed by the flood of anti-Communist legislation that poured out of Congress during the late 1940's and early 1950's.He was particularly concerned that the Supreme Court, during the same period, was eroding one of its most effective weapons for keeping such legislation within constitutional bounds. 2 That weapon is the bill of attainder clauses' which trace their origin to the parliamentary excesses generated by centuries of political dissension and unrest in England.The erosion that concerned Professor Chafee has now been halted, but the bill of attainder clauses remains an uncertain protection against legislation aimed at political dissidents.Toward the end of its 1964 Term, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Brown 4 that section 504 of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959,1 which made it a crime for a Communist Party member to hold union office, was unconstitutional as a bill of attainder.The opinion's doctrinal basis alone made it a notable decision, for Brown was only the third Supreme Court opinion in history to draw upon the bill of attainder prohibition to invalidate a federal statute.0Perhaps more significant, the Court in Brown made an abrupt and emphatic departure from the narrow and technical attainder doctrine
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