Cato Institute
Policy Analysis
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Page 47
1955).
84.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1881).  See also Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"The Path of the Law," Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 457-
78.  For discussions of those changes and their impact on
American law and politics, see Glenn Thurow, "Equality and
Constitutionalism: The Relationship of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution As Understood Today," in
Sarah Thurow, ed., Constitutionalism in America, vol. 1,
To Secure the Blessings of Liberty (Lanham, Md.: Univ-
ersity Press of America, 1988), pp. 305-20; and Roger
Pilon, "Freedom, Responsibility, and the Constitution: On
Recovering Our Founding Principles," Notre Dame Law Review
68 (1993): 507-47.  Mayer also has a brief discussion of
this issue, with references to many additional sources
(see especially pp. 95-96 and attendant notes).
85.  Thus, by 1905 Holmes could write--albeit, still in
dissent--that "a constitution is not intended to embody a
particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the
organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez
faire," notwithstanding the explicit mention in the
Constitution of the rights of property and contract, the
foundations of laissez faire capitalism.  Lochner v. New
York, 198 U.S. 45, 75 (1905).  See Roger Pilon, "On the
Foundations of Economic Liberty," Freeman 38 (September
1988): 338-45.
86.  United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 144
(1938).  Footnote 4 has been called "[t]he great and mod-
ern charter for ordering the relations between judges and
other agencies of government."  Owen M. Fiss, "The Supreme
Court, 1978 Term--Forward: The Forms of Justice," Harvard
law Review 93 (1979): 1, 6.  For a devastating critique of
the politics behind the case, see Geoffrey P. Miller, "The
True Story of Carolene Products," 1987 Supreme Court
Review (1987): 397-428.
87.  In fact, the modern attack on natural rights had
begun long before Slaughterhouse, in 1791 in England, with
the famous remark of Jeremy Bentham, the father of British
utilitarianism, that talk of moral or natural rights was
"simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhe-
torical nonsense,--nonsense upon stilts."  Jeremy Bentham,
"Anarchical Fallacies," in The Works of Jeremy Bentham,
ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), vol. 2, p. 501.
88.  Bork, p. 180.  The quotes from Bork that follow are
from pp. 180-82 (emphasis added).