The Structure of the Religious Liberty Guarantee
I met John Noonan in the office of the late David W. Louisell in January, 1974, and remember to this day just how awestruck I was at being in the company of such great scholars. I find myself even more humbled as I pen this essay in honor of the birthday of my esteemed teacher, advisor, and friend. To be invited to join the festschrift is an extraordinary honor for a former student but it is also an immense challenge. The task of writing a coherent essay for one's professor usually ends upon graduation from law school. To write one in honor of a professor (and a favorite one at that) is an altogether new experience. Because I write to pay tribute to a man whose manner of thinking has indelibly shaped the manner in which I teach my own students, my goal is to write an essay that builds upon the work he has done in the field of law and religion. And if, in the final analysis, it meets that standard, it will do so, in part, because of John Noonan's efforts as a teacher, scholar and role model.
Common Law Court or Council of Revision
Harry Wellington's Interpreting the Constitution offers a highly readable, provocatively old-fashioned, and somewhat complacent account of constitutional decisionmaking by the Supreme Court. The book is the first in a projected series of discussions of legal topics for lay readers,' and the style is lucid and engaging. But Interpreting the Constitution, which provides brisk critiques of leading constitutional theories as well as an affirmative thesis that constitutional adjudication should adhere to a "common law method," also presents a challenge to much of the recent constitutional scholarship produced by academic lawyers for other academic lawyers. Wellington's critical arguments generally achieve their aims. He exposes flaws in the theories he discusses and reveals the dubious foundations of an entire genre of scholarship that calls upon Supreme Court Justices to cast themselves as political philosophers.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.