Doctrine Of Substantive Due Process Research Articles

실체적 적법절차원칙의 비판적 검토

The origin of the due process of law goes back to the Constitution, and it was stipulated in the Amendments to the United States Constitution and established as a principle governing the procedural and substantive aspects of governmental actions that deprive life, liberty, and property. The substantive due process was accepted as a criterion for judicial review after the 1880s, and became the basis for invalidating various economic regulatory legislation in the Lochner era. Since the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court has derived several fundamental rights not enumerated in the Constitution based on the substantive due process doctrine. The due process of law was first introduced into Korean legal order during the period of the U.S. Military Government in Korea. Article 12 of the current Constitution stipulates due procedures. The Constitutional Court and mainstream theories acknowledge that the provision is an adaptation of the Anglo-American due process of law. However, opinions differ as to whether the substantive due process is necessary in the Korean Constitution. In the United States, the substantive due process is criticized as a conceptual contradiction and that the courts take the place of other institutions. Some argue that the due process of law was procedural in its history, and that fundamental rights should be derived from other constitutional provisions. It is also pointed out that there is inconsistency in the specific application of the due process principle, and that there are limitations in determining fundamental rights based on historical and traditional standards. The practical significance of the substantive due process principle cannot be overlooked. However, in order for the substantive due process principle to be recognized in the Korean Constitution, it needs to be supported by convincing arguments. Korea is a single country, has a general provision on the limit of restriction of constitutional rights, and has a detailed list of fundamental rights, leaving less room for the substantive due process to operate than the United States. However, the arguments presented from the standpoint of affirming the necessity of the substantive due process of law are insufficient. In addition, it is judged that the substantive due process of law has not established itself as an independent judicial review standard in the Korean Constitutional Court, at least until now.

Dobbs, History and Tradition, and Substantive Due Process

Another problematic aspect of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson has to do with the legal principle of substantive due process, deriving from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This article provided an in-depth examination of the principle of due process, and demonstrates how the Court’s decision in Dobbs winds up restricting that principle, and thus may not provide the strongest legal ground on which to restrict abortion. Instead, the article concluded that interpreting the due process clause according to its original public meaning would resolve a number of the problems associated with the substantive due process doctrine, affecting other matters beyond that of abortion.

State-Created Environmental Dangers and Substantive Due Process

This Article focuses on the litigation arising out of contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan, lead paint in public housing in New York City, and harms to young people from the impacts of climate change. At the heart of each case is a claim that state officials violated the plaintiffs’ substantive due process rights by creating or enhancing an environmental danger and then deliberately failing to mitigate the risk to the plaintiffs. Although the plaintiffs characterize their claims in similar fashion, the three cases are not likely to enjoy the same success as they move through the courts. The scholarly commentary thus far does not offer satisfying answers to why plaintiffs might state a claim against officials for contaminated drinking water but not for an unstable climate. Although these cases involve novel applications of substantive due process doctrine, scholars have yet to examine exactly if and how they depart from other substantive due process cases. To fill this gap in the literature, this Article seeks to situate these cases in existing doctrine. In doing so, it exposes doctrinal confusion regarding which standards and tests apply to state-created danger claims. In addition, to provide courts with necessary guidance, the Article proposes a framework for state-created danger claims, limited by established common law principles and grounded in the important distinction between challenges to official misconduct and challenges to governmental law or policy.

SCOTUS in the Strait of Messina

The greatest challenge for any civilized society is to find the appropriate balance of rights and responsibilities between the individual and society. In the United States, the Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the line between individual rights and liberties and government powers. The prerogatives and protections for private property rights help to define that line. The Supreme Court has developed two distinct bodies of constitutional jurisprudence bearing on the protections for private property, one under the doctrine of substantive due process and the other under the Takings Clause. But the appropriate balance has been difficult to achieve and the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has been prone to slippage. Thus, substantive due process has now lost its teeth. Unless fundamental rights are implicated, modern substantive due process claims are so unlikely to succeed they are rarely worth making. Modern takings jurisprudence has not lost its teeth, but it has become incoherent and dysfunctional. The Supreme Court does not apply its takings jurisprudence consistently across different types of claims, and its expansive interpretation of public uses has allowed government takings powers to be exploited by powerful political interests. Takings jurisprudence could be made more coherent and less dysfunctional by clarifying the nuisance rule, extending the public use requirement to all takings, and narrowing the interpretation of public uses. These refinements of takings law would empower governments to resolve nuisance conflicts, improve the coherence of the Court’s jurisprudence across different types of takings, constrain governments from using their regulatory and takings powers on behalf of special interests, and reduce the burden of government on private property.

Orzecznictwo Sądu Najwyższego Stanów Zjednoczonych jako autonomiczne źródło tworzenia norm konstytucyjnych

The landmark decisions of the Supreme Court change the ethos of adjudicating. The substantive due process doctrine allowed the Court to become an actual lawgiver. This doctrine widely extended the understanding of the due process clause of the 5 th and 14 th Amendments. Increased power of statutory construction corresponded with the doctrine of loose constructionism (living constitution). Decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade created new constitutional rights, emanating from the radical liberal anthropology. Adjudication became a field of an ideological battle in the culture war over anthropology determining the law’s content . In the classical and Christian understanding, being free is considered as having one’s identity discovered as an ontological constant, thus allowing an individual to develop himself according to the nature’s essence . The liberal anthropological revolution defines freedom as a power of self-creation, serving individual’s preferences. The liberal elites, employing ideas of social engineering, attempt to enforce rules based on coexistence and relationship of equal rights. Individual rights emanate from the autonomous, personal choice of life values, the key of the constitutional interpretation. The wider this right of self-definition , the wider the scope of the state’s intervention. In Griswold v. Connecticut the right to privacy signified deep cultural change rooted in such an anthropology. This “emancipation project” is thus built on an axiology destroying relations, becoming a kind of a religion of secular salvation. The state serves here as a demiurge and is sacralized. This causes an increasing abyss between the elites and the rest of the citizens, with a corresponding social disintegration of it’s public life. For instance Obergefell v. Hodges enforces a new anthropological definition of marriage, beginning to delegitimize creeds and actions of religious communities. This reflects a global phenomenon of connecting individual liberal rights with politics of identity and the post-modern culture of right understood as autonomous will without reasoning about its ontological, universal basis. The Supreme Court decisions are not separated from wider culture, but based on the new anthropological understanding of man as a consumer, with his individual will becoming the very basis of rights.

A Visual Guide to United States v. Windsor: Doctrinal Origins of Justice Kennedy's Majority Opinion

After finding the Court had jurisdiction, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in United States v. Windsor reached the merits and concluded that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was in violation of the Fifth Amendment. In his dissent, Justice Scalia attacked the majority’s doctrinal reasoning on the merits as “nonspecific handwaving” that invalidated DOMA “maybe on equal-protection grounds, maybe on substantive due process grounds, and perhaps with some amorphous federalism component playing a role.” This Visual Guide is a “doctrinal map” that responds to Scalia’s accusation by charting the doctrinal origins of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Specifically, the map shows how both equal protection and substantive due process doctrine have contributed to a constitutional jurisprudence that affirms the rights of same-sex couples. Moreover, the map also takes the sting from Justice Scalia’s complaints in Windsor that the majority failed to ask under substantive due process whether same-sex marriage was a right “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and also failed to clearly articulate a “tier of scrutiny” when considering whether DOMA violated equal protection. As analysis of the opinions represented in the map demonstrates, the Court has long applied tests other than Scalia’s when conducting both substantive due process and equal protection review. Indeed, Kennedy’s doctrinal approach is consistent with precedent and the particular doctrinal traditions advanced by Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Blackmun. This Visual Guide is a single-page PDF “poster” designed to serve as quick reference and teaching tool.

Brandeis, Gitlow, and the Supreme Court’s Transformation During the Interwar Years

Brandeis, Gitlow, and the Supreme Court’s Transformation During the Interwar Years William G. Ross (bio) Marc Lendler. Gitlow v. New York: Every Idea an Incitement. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. xiv + 173 pp. Bibliography and index. $34.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). Melvin I. Urofsky. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York: Schocken Books, 2009. viii + 953 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $40.00 (cloth); 24.95 (paper). The U.S. Supreme Court’s emergence as a significant force in protecting non-economic personal liberties was one of the most important political and legal developments of the 1920s and 1930s. The Court’s increasingly rigorous scrutiny of legislation that restricted personal liberty also had profound implications for federalism insofar as the Court, during these decades, began the process by which it has incrementally incorporated into state law nearly all of the liberties prescribed by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Marc Lendler makes an important contribution toward an understanding of these events in his fine study of Gitlow v. New York, the 1925 decision in which the Supreme Court began to nationalize the Bill of Rights by declaring that the First Amendment’s provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of the press are binding upon the states. The Court’s newfound solicitude for personal liberties owed much to the influence of Louis D. Brandeis, whose immense contributions to the development of American law before and during his long tenure (1916–39) as a Supreme Court justice are beautifully chronicled and shrewdly analyzed in Melvin I. Urofsky’s biography. In Gitlow, the Supreme Court sustained the conviction of Benjamin Gitlow, a member of the American Communist Party, for violating a New York statute that criminalized the advocacy of “the doctrine that organized government should be overthrown by force or violence . . . or by any other illegal means.” Although this decision left Gitlow in jail, the case greatly advanced the cause of civil liberties not only because of the Court’s offhand dictum nationalizing the free speech and free press clauses of the First Amendment, but also because of the influential dissenting opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which Brandeis joined. Declaring that “every idea is an incitement,” Holmes [End Page 687] contended that the government could criminalize speech only when there is a very close proximity between words and illegal actions. Holmes and Brandeis already had espoused broad theories of free speech in their dissents in earlier cases involving prosecution of opponents of U.S. participation in the First World War, and Brandeis developed these ideas more fully in his magisterial concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927). More than forty years later, in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the views of Brandeis and Holmes became the law of the land. Lendler meticulously guides the reader through complex political and procedural mazes that culminated in the prosecution of Gitlow and the Court’s affirmation of his conviction. Although Lendler brings Gitlow into careful focus within the context of other freedom of speech cases, he says little about the case’s significance in the process of the nationalization of the Bill of Rights. The book ignores Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a case in which the Supreme Court, only one week before its decision in Gitlow, struck down an Oregon law requiring all children to attend a public school; and it barely mentions Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), in which the Court invalidated a Nebraska law prohibiting the teaching of German. Meyer and Pierce are seminal civil cases because they marked the first time the Court invoked the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect non-economic personal liberties. Although the Court based these decisions on economic rights, both decisions included dicta that espoused a broad vision of human liberty that presaged the Court’s emergence as a guardian of personal freedoms. Lendler’s book would be more resonant if it explored Gitlow’s relationship to these cases, which formed a bridge between the Court’s doctrine of substantive due process to protect economic rights and its use of substantive due process and nationalization of the Bill of Rights to protect civil liberties. Lendler’s book...

Have Justices Stevens and Kennedy Forged a New Doctrine of Substantive Due Process?

As issues such as the nature of the sexual, marital, and other relationships and claims—both personal and economic—continue to face Americans and America’s lawyers, the question of how we as a people distinguish fundamental from non-fundamental rights is one of first importance. In constitutional law, the Supreme Court has addressed this question through the doctrine of “Substantive Due Process.” In his lengthy dissent in McDonald v. Chicago—his final opinion as a Supreme Court Justice—Justice John Paul Stevens claimed that substantive due process is fundamentally a matter of how we interpret the meaning of the word “liberty.” The issue as to whether the right is specifically enumerated in the Amendments is irrelevant, Stevens argues, if the interest is naturally within the definition of “liberty.” Moreover, Justice Stevens’s argument in McDonald was approved by his liberal colleagues on the Court, which indicates that his theory of liberty may well become the baseline for determining what are, and what are not, fundamental rights. However, in the recent case of United States v. Windsor, the Court refused to employ the substantive due process doctrine, as traditionally understood, as the basis for striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Instead, the Court employed rational basis review, finding that the legislative purpose and effect behind DOMA was “to disparage and to injure” those wishing to enter into same-sex marriages, and thus served “no legitimate purpose.” Still, Justice Kennedy clearly signals in his Windsor opinion that some formulation of the substantive due process doctrine remains alive and well as a constitutional basis for deciding Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Due Process “liberty” interests such as same-sex marriage. Indeed, both Justices share a conceptual core in their understandings of what constitutes a constitutionally protected liberty interest.

Ultra Vires Land Use Regulations: A Special Case in Substantive Due Process

The U.S. Supreme Court's land use jurisprudence establishes that arbitrary land use regulations violate the doctrine of substantive due process. Ultra vires land use regulations – those regulations that exceed the delegated authority of the regulating agency under state law – represent a particular type of arbitrary land use regulation. Lower federal courts that have examined such regulations are split on the question whether they violate substantive due process. This article contrasts two federal Court of Appeals cases in which property owners alleged that a local government agency deprived them of property without due process of law by enforcing an ultra vires land use regulation against them. The article concludes that, consistent with Supreme Court precedent, ultra vires land use regulations must violate the substantive due process rights of the individuals whom they affect.

Protective Labor Legislation in the Courts: Substantive Due Process and Fairness in the Progressive Era

The Supreme Court's decision inLochner v. New York(1905), invalidating an act limiting working hours for bakers as a violation of contractual freedom, has come to symbolize an era in constitutional law. The period covers the years from the end of the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era. Its chief characteristic, according to its critics, is the judiciary's hostility to progressive labor legislation. Statutes intended to protect vulnerable classes from the ravages of industrialization were routinely defeated in the courts. Progressives pioneered an interpretation in whichLochnerbecame a leading “anticanonical” case, wrongly deploying the doctrine of substantive due process to shield inherited distributions of wealth and power. The time is long past when scholars characterized the era as a product of judges' reactionary commitments to laissez-faire or, worse, to Social Darwinism, following Justice Holmes's quip, dissenting inLochner, that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.” Contemporary scholars have reconstructed the period's jurisprudence, finding in it a principled commitment to a conception of justice grounded in the Founding. The most widely accepted explanation, developed by Gillman's influential study, is that substantive due process embodied a principle of neutrality requiring courts to distinguish the authentic public aims of legislation from illegitimate attempts to advantage some classes at others' expense. An alternative explanation is that judges, drawing on the theory of natural rights, developed the doctrine of substantive due process to limit government's discretion to encumber prepolitical rights to private property and liberty of contract.

Substantive Due Process and American Planning Law

Certain jurisprudence of the Supreme Court continues its profound, and perhaps baneful, effect on American planning law. That jurisprudence relates to the invented constitutional doctrine of substantive due process, which remains popular among lawyers attacking and defending land use actions. This article analyzes that doctrine, attempts to demonstrate its inadequacies, and suggests alternatives to its use.

A Prisoner’s Right to Access DNA Evidence to Prove His Innocence: Post-Osborne Options

Despite advances in DNA technology and the ability, for the first time, to prove almost conclusively the guilt or innocence of a defendant, the Supreme Court recently held that access to DNA testing is constitutionally irrelevant. In District Attorney's Office v. Osborne, the Supreme Court held that there is no independent Constitutional right to post-conviction DNA testing under the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, the Court held that it must be left up to the States to enact post-conviction relief statutes. This Note posits that the Court must acknowledge the inevitable changes that modern DNA testing presents to the court system and lead the way in creating fitting policy that ensures all prisoners are able to access evidence to prove their innocence. It will argue that the protections afforded to individuals under the Constitution of the United States must be analyzed in light of modern society and its capabilities. Nothing is more fundamental to the Constitution than the protection of individual liberty so our system of jurisprudence must be flexible enough to incorporate scientific advances that will allow the Court to better safeguard this important right. Lastly, it will argue that for the following reasons, the most likely means of accomplishing the recognition of this right is through the substantive due process doctrine.

The Unruly Character of Politics

Every age has its issue and ours may be abortion. It has posed many challenges to the Supreme Court, above all that of reexamining the long discredited doctrine of substantive due process. The 1973 ruling in favor of the individual woman’s right to choose to have an abortion sharply divided the Court and over the next two decades the Court has had to revisit the issue to see whether the initial ruling should be affirmed, as indeed it has been.Beyond that, the Court has had to find a place within the constitutional order for the losers: To what extent shall those opposed to abortion be allowed to air their views and keep the controversy alive? Because the pro-life forces have not been content to advance their cause only through the ballot box or the courts, but have most decidedly taken to the streets, specifically to picket abortion clinics and the doctors who work in them, the abortion controversy has also forced the Supreme Court to probe the limits of the First Amendment and its guarantee of free speech. This is my subject.

A study on the Analysis of Unenumerated Rights - Comparison between Substantive Due Process Doctrine and the Ninth Amendment Approach

A study on the Analysis of Unenumerated Rights - Comparison between Substantive Due Process Doctrine and the Ninth Amendment Approach

Of Marriage and Monarchy: Why John Locke Would Support Same-Sex Marriage

Arguments about discrimination based on sexual orientation generally rest on interpretations of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or about rights to autonomy rooted in modern substantive due process doctrine. Such theories typically presuppose a government that remains neutral among competing moral claims. This Article, by contrast, develops an account of rights against sexual orientation discrimination - including recognition of same-sex marriage - that does not depend on a thin moral conception of the liberal state. Instead, I situate lesbian/gay rights within a Lockean political theory of consent. John Locke's theory of government, which was highly influential for the Founders of the United States, provides a positive moral basis for lesbian/gay equality. Locke's theory derives from the Bible, the observation that the Christian God did not establish governments among humans. Locke also rejected the account of original sin according to which humans need strong government to control their sinful natures. The only reasonable inference is that God intended for all humans to start out as equals, and to negotiate political solutions among themselves in keeping with the imperative to protect the natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke's theory depends on the capacity of individuals for moral reasoning. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation entails denying the moral-reasoning capacity of lesbians and gay men. Why would any rational lesbian or gay man consent to a government that has the power to discriminate against them based on their sexual orientation? Conservative opposition to same-sex marriage in the twenty-first century is functionally equivalent to conservative support for absolute monarchy in the seventeenth century.

Formalism and Realism in Commerce Clause Jurisprudence

This Article attempts a reconceptualization of developments in Commerce Clause jurisprudence between the Civil War and World War II by identifying ways in which that jurisprudence was structurally related to and accordingly deeply influenced by the categories of substantive due process and dormant Commerce Clause doctrine. Antecedent dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence set the terms within which Commerce Clause doctrine was worked out; coordinate developments in substantive due process doctrine set limits upon the scope of Commerce Clause formulations and thus played a critical and underappreciated role in maintaining the federal equilibrium. The subsequent erosion of those due process limitations vastly expanded federal power and prompted a crisis in Commerce Clause jurisprudence that was ultimately resolved by adoption of a political process approach to both affirmative and dormant Commerce Clause adjudication. The categories that had unified affirmative and dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence were abandoned, decoupling the two lines of doctrine and rendering them no longer developmentally interdependent. The two lines went their separate ways, economic substantive due process disappeared, and the enterprise of interdoctrinal coordination that had held a vast body of constitutional law together was lost to history. We continue to study the development of these lines of doctrine in our Constitutional Law curricula, but we do so in an ahistorical manner that obscures understanding. We study the development of doctrine topically rather than synchronically, wresting lines of doctrine from the related doctrinal contexts in which they developed. Such decontextualization, in this case as in others, is a surefire method of making the entire undertaking look preposterous. Looking back at this jurisprudence from the vantage and through the categories of our contemporary constitutional sensibility, it becomes difficult to understand how any intelligent person could ever have taken the enterprise seriously. Yet a very great many clearly did. This piece seeks to understand why and how that could have been, while at the same time explaining why the enterprise unraveled in the way it did when it did. What emerges, I hope, is a new way of thinking and teaching about constitutional development in this critical period.

Formalism and Realism in Commerce Clause Jurisprudence

This Article attempts a reconceptualization of developments in Commerce Clause jurisprudence between the Civil War and World War II by identifying ways in which that jurisprudence was structurally related to and accordingly deeply influenced by the categories of substantive due process and dormant Commerce Clause doctrine. Antecedent dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence set the terms within which Commerce Clause doctrine was worked out; coordinate developments in substantive due process doctrine set limits upon the scope of Commerce Clause formulations and thus played a critical and underappreciated role in maintaining the federal equilibrium. The subsequent erosion of those due process limitations vastly expanded federal power and prompted a crisis in Commerce Clause jurisprudence that was ultimately resolved by adoption of a political process approach to both affirmative and dormant Commerce Clause adjudication. The categories that had unified affirmative and dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence were abandoned, decoupling the two lines of doctrine and rendering them no longer developmentally interdependent. The two lines went their separate ways, economic substantive due process disappeared, and the enterprise of interdoctrinal coordination that had held a vast body of constitutional law together was lost to history. We continue to study the development of these lines of doctrine in our Constitutional Law curricula, but we do so in an ahistorical manner that obscures understanding. We study the development of doctrine topically rather than synchronically, wresting lines of doctrine from the related doctrinal contexts in which they developed. Such decontextualization, in this case as in others, is a surefire method of making the entire undertaking look preposterous. Looking back at this jurisprudence from the vantage and through the categories of our contemporary constitutional sensibility, it becomes difficult to understand how any intelligent person could ever have taken the enterprise seriously. Yet a very great many clearly did. This piece seeks to understand why and how that could have been, while at the same time explaining why the enterprise unraveled in the way it did when it did. What emerges, I hope, is a new way of thinking and teaching about constitutional development in this critical period.

Doctrinal Synergies and Liberal Dilemmas: The Case of the Yellow-Dog Contract

The three decades spanning the years 1908 to 1937 saw a remarkable transformation of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence concerning the rights of workers to organize. In 1908, the Court held that a federal law prohibiting employers from discharging an employee because of his membership in a union violated the of secured to the employer by the Fifth Amendment. In 1915, the Court similarly declared a state statute prohibiting the use of contracts unconstitutional. In 1937, by contrast, the Court upheld provisions of the Wagner Act prohibiting both discharges for union membership and the use of yellow-dog contracts. Thus, the doctrine of liberty of contract no longer operated as a bar to legislation protecting the rights of workers to organize for purposes of collective bargaining. The tale of the yellow-dog is naturally of interest because of its centrality to the development of American law and the decline of substantive due process. Beyond this, however, the story can be seen as a critical chapter in the development of American liberal legalism. The yellow-dog provoked something of a crisis in liberal discourse, because it brought into conflict two time-honored liberal values: of and freedom of association. Recent scholarship has shown how liberty of contract was forged from such diverse liberal resources as Adam Smith's liberal political economy, Jacksonian liberalism, and the Northern free labor ideology that animated the abolitionist movement. Freedom of association enjoyed no less venerable liberal pedigree. Its protection against government infringement enshrined in the First Amendment, the freedom to affiliate with the lawful organizations of one's choice had been a widely embraced feature of American culture since well before the Civil War. Indeed, the passion of the American people for voluntary associations had attracted the fascination of Alexis de Tocqueville during his journey to the United States in the 1830s. The yellow-dog exposed a tension between these two values of American liberalism. Opponents of the yellow-dog contended that the employer was using his constitutionally protected of as a means to inhibit his employee's freedom to associate with his fellow workingmen. In characteristically liberal terms, the answer to this charge would turn on whether the employee was seen as having surrendered his freedom of association voluntarily, or as a product of coercion. The answer to this question would in turn depend upon assumptions about the structure of the market, and these assumptions would change over time. Beneath this discourse, I believe, lay concerns about whether unions were properly analogized to the other sorts of voluntary associations celebrated by American liberalism. As those concerns became increasingly allayed over time, labor's advocates could more successfully appropriate the liberal rhetoric of associational freedom. Yet the story of the demise of the yellow dog cannot be adequately understood by looking at cultural context alone. In order to understand the voting patterns of the various Justices and the views they expressed in their opinions, one must pay close attention to the development of doctrine. A study of the doctrine pertaining to the yellow-dog reveals to us the difficulties with the notion that substantive due process and constitutional federalism were merely convenient weapons in the arsenal of a reactionary Court devoted to the maintenance of financial and industrial elites. Instead, we may see the weblike, interconnected structure of laissez-faire constitutionalism. The doctrinal manifestations of Commerce Clause and due process jurisprudence were not simply free-floating rules that could be changed or abandoned without consequences extending beyond the particular doctrine involved. These areas of doctrine were developmentally intra- and interdependent. Modifications of one substantive due process doctrine entailed changes in another; developments in due process and Commerce Clause doctrine produced mutual, synergistic ramifications. In short, doctrinal commitments made by Justices in one area of doctrine entailed corresponding commitments in other doctrinal domains. In order to follow the trail of the yellow dog contract, we must trace these ripple effects across structurally related areas of doctrine.