Epstein On Supreme Court Laziness

Richard Epstein provides a window into a little know case and a lazy effort by some of our Supreme Court jurists in arriving at their decisions. The prime culprit in their frivolous deliberation is the use of a subjective standard called "rational basis".

In the run up to the Supreme Court’s decision on health care, few people will pay any attention to the Court’s most recent constitutional failure of intellectual nerve in Amour v. Indianapolis. But they should. This instructive case encapsulates what goes wrong when the Supreme Court abandons its constitutional obligation to prevent the nonstop shenanigans of local governments.