The Supreme Court: The Limits That Create Liberty & The Liberty That Creates Limits

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sees the Court as a "national schoolmaster." During last term's sit-in cases (set aside on narrow grounds), Goldberg argued that the 14th Amendment bans private racial discrimination in public accommodations. Not so, snapped Black. In the absence of state-enforced segregation or valid federal law, said Black, the 14th Amendment "does not compel either a black man or a white man running his own private business to trade with anyone else against his will." And he added: "The worst citizen no less than the best is entitled to equal protection of the laws of his state and of his nation."

Many of the Court's most knowledgeable observers believe that Black's defense of property rights not only shows a sure sense of the law's limits, but also serves as a reminder that the 14th Amendment embodies an old American proposition that somewhere Government power stops and the right to privacy begins. This week the Court begins a new term in its endless quest for the proper limits creating liberty and the range of liberty creating limits, proving once again that "equal justice under law" is what the U.S. Supreme Court is all about.

* The Court was organized with six Justices in 1789, was cut to five in 1801 by the lame-duck Federalist Congress to prevent President Jefferson from appointing a Republican. Congress raised the number to seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863, cut back to the present nine in 1869. Had Congress approved F.D.R.'s court-packing plan in 1937, there could now be 15 Justices.