Now that I've returned from my weekend on the Monterey Peninsula, it's time for your English lesson. Calling your statement to the effect that:
twaddle is not "ad hominem."
"Ad hominem" means:
I made no comment about you personally. I contemptuously dismissed your comment.
Statements like "there is a school of thought" or "it's reported that" are particularly shabby rhetorical tricks insofar as they fail to cite or document the authority relied upon and thus don't permit testing of the claim. Such statements are, therefore, fully worthy of derision.
You fail to properly cite
Boyd. Therefore, you've made it difficult for us to (1) find the case; and (2) know whether the
Boyd v. U. S. one finds is the one you mean (there are a number of cases thus styled).
However, since we're apparently agreed that the case you mean is
Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 29 L.Ed. 746, 6 S.Ct. 524 (1886), let's look at why it doesn't support your assertion that (post 68):
Boyd involved an action to seize certain goods allegedly fraudulently imported into the United States. To sustain the fraud allegations, the United States sought and obtained certain records and papers of the importer. The records and papers were obtained pursuant to a statute (116 U. S. 616, at 619 -- 620):
As the Court framed the question to be addressed (at 622):
The Court essentially found that under the circumstances of the
Boyd the seizure of the importer's records and papers under the statute, in lieu of a warrant satisfying Fourth Amendment standards, was unreasonable.
Note that
Boyd, has since been narrowed, even substantially eviscerated (see
Edwin Hale v. William Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906);
Oklahoma Press Pub Co v. Walling News Printing Co v. Same, 327 U.S. 186 (1946);
Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967);
Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323 (1966);
Berger v. New York, 388 U.S. 41 (1967);
Marron v. United States, 275 U.S. 192 (1927)).
Again, that case (
Gouled v. United States, 255 U.S. 298, 41 S.Ct. 261, 65 L.Ed. 647 (1921)) does support you.
What the Court dealt with in
Gouled was specifically (255 U. S. 298, at 303):
The Court in
Gouled also disallowed on Fifth Amendment grounds (purportedly based on
Boyd) certain evidence obtained pursuant to a warrant.
But at the end of the day what those cases, as well as other cases in the substantial body of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, address is whether a search or seizure in a particular case, and under the circumstances presented, is or is not reasonable.
Presumably you're referring to the case of
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857). If so, you mis-characterize the rulings of the Supreme Court. As
summarized by the Library of Congress, in
Dred Scott the Court ruled:
But that's not what the
Emancipation Proclamation did (this link takes on to the text of the document).
Essentially, Lincoln (1) declared that certain States were in rebellion and identified those States; (2) declared that slaves held within those rebellious States were free; and (3) directed the executive departments of the United States government to recognize such persons a free persons.
The Emancipation Proclamation had no force or effect in the States not designated as being in rebellion against the United States. Nor was it ever tested in court, so it's not clear whether the Proclamation had any real effect.
Of course Dred Scott and the Emancipation Proclamation were mooted by the adoption of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Actually no. Those are good examples of folks who understood the real world and how to deal effectively in the real world. Certain Dick Heller was well guided by a group of very able lawyers and legal scholars.
The Rosa Parks story nicely illustrates how to accomplish social change.
- Rosa Parks had a long history of being actively involved in the organized Civil Rights Movement:
- At the time of her arrest Mrs. Parks was an adviser to the NAACP.
- On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks was the third African-American since March of that year to be arrested for violating the Montgomery bus segregation law. One was Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old girl who was arrested some nine months earlier. E. D. Nixon decided that Claudette would be a poor "poster-child" for a protest because she was unmarried and pregnant.
- The night of Mrs. Parks' arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, head of the Women's Political Council, printed and circulated a flyer throughout Montgomery's black community starting the call for a boycott of Montgomery's city buses.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association and pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, together with other Black community leaders, then organized the boycott of the Montgomery bus system. That boycott reduced Black ridership (the bulk of the bus system's paying customers) of Montgomery city buses by some 90% until December of 1956 when the Supreme Court ruled that the bus segregation laws of Montgomery, Alabama were unconstitutional (Gayle v. Browder, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)).
- So the Rosa Parks incident is more than a matter of not moving to the back of the bus. Her arrest was part of a well orchestrated, well organized, multilayered program reflecting good planning and political acumen leading to a successful conclusion. If it had not been she would have just been another Black person arrested for violating that ordinance.
- Please note especially that prior to the Rosa Parks incident E. D. Nixon rejected one "arrestee" as standard bearer for the protect because of possible image problems.
You really need to get a better grasp of the facts.