About us

A dominant theme of the Declaration of Independence is that individual rights pre-exist governments and that governments are created for the limited purpose of securing these pre-existing rights. The framers were well acquainted with the danger of subjecting the determination of individual rights to the "tyranny of shifting majorities." I.N.S. v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 960, 961 (1993).

In an essay criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court for deferring to legislatures at the expense of individual rights, H.L. Mencken attacked Justice Holmes' belief that "the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum; that the courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including, apparently, even the Bill of Rights." Mr. Mencken responded: "It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation on their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit. The Fathers, in framing it, did not have powerful minorities in mind; what they sought to hobble was simply the majority. But this is a detail. The important thing is that the Bill of Rights sets forth, in the plainest of plain language, the limits beyond which even legislatures may not go."

It is, of course, the role of the court to check the tyranny of the majority and secure individual rights from legislatures and those portending to act on their behalves. It is the role of the Center for Justice and Constitutional Litigation to enforce the Bill of Rights through litigation on behalf of aggrieved individuals (or groups of individuals) to secure those rights.