Supreme Court opinions (holdings) have helped shape the way our constitution is applied to specific cases which then serve as precedents for the application of laws. With extraordinary prescience, our Founding Fathers crafted a document of general principles rather than detailed laws, and designed into the governance established thereby, a system of three institutions held in dynamic checks and balances. The judiciary branch was assigned the role of interpreting the legality (constitutionality) of laws passed by the Legislative, or actions taken by, the Executive Branches. In the course of our nation’s history, there have been a number of landmark holdings on specific cases which then helped to define the way our government can operate. Students of Constitutional Law are expected to be familiar with these cases and the areas of the law to which they apply. In Law school, Dr. Randall Furlong was an editor for the Georgetown Law Review and, in order to help students keep them in memory, invented summaries of some of these landmark holdings expressed as haiku, the classic Japanese 17 syllable poem (In a 5-7-5 arrangement). At a time when constitutional principles, especially in regard to the separation of church and state or our individual rights to privacy and to freedom from coercion, seem to have been challenged by practices of the present administration, it is, perhaps, timely to remind ourselves of the history of some of these legal precedents.

Tags: balance of powers, constitutional law, holdings, landmark cases, legal precedents, Supreme Court