Contributions by ‘Rephael G. Stern’
To Save Democracy from Juristocracy: J.B. Thayer and Congressional Power after the Civil War
In late summer 1883, Harvard Law School professor James Bradley Thayer returned from a trip to England. There he had witnessed the debate on the Third Reform Bill, known officially as the Representation of the People Act, which passed the next year. More than any other step, by nearly doubling the electorate, it ratified the emergence of democracy, understood as a practice of lawmaking by political representatives of a mass electorate, in the world’s then-leading power. Arriving at home, however, Thayer witnessed the negation of newly won national popular authority over law. Only a few months after his return, on October 15, 1883, the United States Supreme Court decided the Civil Rights Cases, invalidating Congress’s Civil Rights Act of 1875. This and other offensive events shifting power from Congress to unelected judges provoked Thayer to embark on a mission to save democracy.
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