Hell May Not Be Freezing Over but ...

New York Times devotees must be putting on their (synthetic) fur lined gloves when they read this op-ed piece from Princeton Jurisprudence Professor Robert P. George. Here is an extract:

The Supreme Court's "privacy jurisprudence" began in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut. By a vote of 7 to 2, the justices invalidated a state law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples. (Laws of this sort had been on the books for decades, though they were rarely if ever enforced and most have since been repealed by legislatures.) Lacking a textual or historical warrant for invalidating the law, Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the majority, claimed to find a "right of marital privacy" in "penumbras, formed by emanations" from a range of constitutional guarantees, none of which had anything to do with sexual conduct.

Douglas's quasi-metaphysical language elicited derision, and to this day remains an embarrassment to liberal constitutional jurisprudence. The justices would have done better to take the dissenting advice of Hugo Black, the court's leading civil libertarian. Black said that although he didn't like the law, the court was usurping the constitutional authority of legislatures by simply inventing a right that the nation's founders had not seen fit to enshrine.
...
Clearly, it is not the Constitution that accounts for the outcomes in the court's "privacy" cases; it is simply the moral and political opinions of the justices. The nation will be fortunate if Judge Roberts understands that the result of the court's invention of a generalized right to privacy has been 40 years of unprincipled - and unpredictable - constitutional law.

Even anti-NYT conservatives should register on the website and read the entire piece.