Adamson V. California - Black's Dissent

Black's Dissent

Justice Hugo Black, however, had strong convictions against this decision and wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion, in which he argued for the incorporation of the first eight Amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Specifically, Black argued that while the Court should not incorporate rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights, it should "extend to all the people of the nation the protection of the Bill of Rights."

Black's dissent--beyond advocating for incorporation--was also a criticism of the Court's use of natural law in the arena of incorporation. First, Black thought that the Court's use of natural law to discard the argument that the right to be free from self-incrimination should be incorporated was misguided. "I further contend that the 'natural law' formula which the Court uses to reach its conclusion in this case should be abandoned as an incongruous excrescence on our Constitution. I believe that formula to be itself a violation of our Constitution, in that it subtly conveys to courts, at the expense of legislatures, ultimate power over public policies . . .," Black wrote.

Because of this belief that natural law actually restricted the rights of citizens under the Constitution, Black also called for the overruling of Twining v. New Jersey, where the Court turned to natural law to support its decision. Indeed, Black thought that the Court's guiding light for incorporation, that is, asking whether the interest at stake is "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," "degraded the constitutional safeguards of the Bill of Rights, and simultaneously appropriate for this Court a broad power which not authorized by the Constitution to exercise."