Reply #34: So Judges have done that for years.

[happyslug]

In fact the legal Concept of At-will employment is s product of the post-Civil War Period, prior to that time period the Common Law was quite clear, all employment contracts were one year in duration and if your employer wanted to fire you he still had to pay you a full years salary. Conservative "Activist" Judges reversed that Decision and you do not year any Conservation saying we should return to the original common Law. In fact Conservatives re-wrote the common law between 1869 and 1905 (and the Locher Decision) so much to claim Stare Decise would have made people laugh. These Judges justified the Changes to do "Changes in society" i.e. the raise of Industry and the need to protect "Business". When people then started to undo this damage by legislature you had the Court striking such laws down until late in the Great Depression (Jones and Laughlin vs NLRB) when the Court finally decided the only way to save ANY of the changes made since the Civil War was to leave Congress and the State Legislature change back what they thought was needed (and to make other changes to reflect the changes made by the Judges in the Common LAw from 1860 till 1905).

The only exception was First Amendment law and the Incorporation of the rest of the Bill of Rights against the States. Freedom of expression and then the Right of Privacy were also expanded in the post-Depression Period (Ending in Roe vs Wade). This expansion had support among the majority of people, even the Vast majority till Roe vs Wade (Roe vs Wade was really the first case the Court Decided where you had a large number of people objecting to a Court Decision regarding Privacy and the bill of Rights).

Now you have to view the Civil Rights movement separately. While the Court did lead in its Desegregation Decision, the pressure to end segregation came from the Blacks (and other people) who oppose segregation NOT FROM THE COURTS. It is only with the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and finally passage of Federal Aid to the Schools with a provision that no funds could go to segregated Schools in 1974 that the Courts started to rule against Segregation. Thus it is a Separate situation from the Above.