The Founding Era

     After watching the videos provided by Dr. Smith, I began to ask myself a lot of questions about the Supreme Court, the first one being: So, what do they really do? 

    According to supremecourt :"As the final arbiter of the law, the Court is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under law and, thereby, also functions as guardian and interpreter of the Constitution". This sounds very promising right? So you might understand why I was shocked when Dr. Smith informed us that the first time the Supreme Court ever used the first amendment to protect people was in 1931 in near-v-minnesota. Yes, 140 years AFTER it was put in place. Knowing this made reading the definition of the Supreme Court very ironic to me, especially after seeing the timelines in the videos and realizing how much was going on at the time and the power the Supreme Court had to stop it. 

Some important takeaways that I had from this lecture and videos were that: 

For starters I learned that there were already people revolting against the idea of slavery all the way back in 1620 most of them being religious groups, this made me realize that the fight for racial justice has been going on for longer than I expected. On one hand it’s good to know that there were people fighting for this in 1620, on the other it’s sad to see that there are still people fighting for racial justice today in 2021. Something else that was interesting to me were the three compromises made by the north in 1787, I always believed that the south was the big evil trying to keep slavery alive and the north was against slavery and wanted to end, but I quickly realized that there were a lot of people in the north benefiting financially from slavery which is why things were moving so SLOW. 

One thing that stuck me from the bedrock principles video was that that the first amendment is not absolute, throughout history this has been shown to protect the wrong people and while it is good to know that people are still charged with incitement and other felonies like that it really all goes back to who’s judging you and how they see your actions, this to me means that the first amendment is not as strong as people think it is and it might not always protect them.