“[Black] would not admit that the child-labor decision [invalidating child-labor restrictions] was final. Instead, he said: ‘The Constitution is final,’ for six new members had come into the Court since 1918, and ‘no doctrine of stare decisis applies to opinions on constitutional interpretation.’ He expressed his basic conviction that constitutional interpretation was a product of the times in which men lived, and that ‘the tendency of today is to give a new and exalted emphasis to the more sacred right of human beings to enjoy health, happiness, and security justly theirs in proportion to their industry, frugality, energy and honesty.’”
John P. Frank, Mr. Justice Black: The Man and His Opinions (1948) at 90. Justice Black was an American original. Born in dirt poor Clay County Alabama and a one-time member of the KKK, he became a champion of civil liberties and civil rights, and a staunch supporter of FDR’s New Deal. A constitutional literalist who believed that the Bill of Rights applied in toto to the states (a minority view on the Supreme Court), he also refused to find a constitutionally protected right of privacy and opposed the concept of substantive due process. Although a literalist, he also believed that judges enjoyed a broad mandate to interpret the constitutional text to its maximum extent in light of changing times. The concepts of original intent or a frozen constitutional text were anathema to him.
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