(Download) "Methodology, Proportionality, Equality: Which Moral Question Does the Eighth Amendment Pose?(Symposium: Law and Morality)" by Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Methodology, Proportionality, Equality: Which Moral Question Does the Eighth Amendment Pose?(Symposium: Law and Morality)
- Author : Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 285 KB
Description
The words of the Eighth Amendment have a history much longer than the life of the Amendment itself. When the First Congress chose to include those words in the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights, the assembled legislators were appropriating an artifact of their English heritage. At that moment, the language was celebrating its centenary, having first been drafted and adopted by the English Parliament in the Bill of Rights of 1689. (1) Parliament enacted the 1689 Bill of Rights to articulate limitations on what future monarchs could do. A century later, Congress included the Eighth Amendment's historic language among limitations on what the new American nation's government could do. Many of the Revolutionary American states had already employed the words to limit their own governments, starting with Virginia in 1776. (2) Those states had, in the wake of independence, created bills of rights that recited the historic prohibition of excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments. (3) But the deliberations on whether to include that prohibition, both in the national Bill of Rights and in those of the states, were rather perfunctory. This suggests that in adopting the language, the American Founders were reflexively claiming part of their English heritage, part of what they had fought for, part of what they alleged had been denied them by a monarch and an unrepresentative Parliament in the pre-Revolutionary period. That conclusion invites an inference that the American Founders meant the Amendment's language to fulfill the function that it had historically fulfilled for the English. (4)