The U.S. Supreme Court and Minority Races

Alexander Hamilton, urging his fellow New Yorkers to ratify the pending U.S. Constitution in the summer of 1788, wrote that people need not fear the provision for lifetime tenure of Supreme Court justices: such tenure would keep the justices independent from majoritarian political pressures, thereby enabling them both to stand firm in defense of the constitutional rights of the individual and of the “minor party,” and also to “mitigat[e] the severity” of “unjust and partial laws” that operate with harshness on “particular classes of citizens” but do not amount to an “infraction[] of the Constitution.” 1 Justice Joseph Story in his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution, published while he served on the Court, similarly justified independence of the judiciary from electoral politics: