Legal Commentary

A Funny Thing About ?Substantive Due Process?

By David Bernstein

In his Stop the Beach opinion, Justice Scalia writes, ?The first problem with using Substantive Due Process to do the work of the Takings Clause is that we have held it cannot be done.?

But hold on! The Takings Clause does not apply to the states. The Fourteenth Amendment?s Due Process Clause applies to the states. The Supreme Court has held that the rights protected by the Clause include the rights delineated by the Fifth Amendment via ?incorporation.?

You can see where this is going. Enforcing the Fifth Amendment?s Takings Clause against the states via the Due Process Clause is literally an exercise in protecting a substantive right through that clause, and therefore is ?substantive due process.?

I understand, of course, that in modern constitutional discourse we distinguish between ?substantive due process? and the ?incorporation doctrine.? But I think this distinction is incoherent, an illogical historical artifact. 

Basically, the post-New Deal Justices who wanted to protect some or all of the rights contained in the Bill of Rights against the states needed to blunt criticism that they were emulating their discredited pre-New Deal predecessors. The pre-New Deal Justices had also protected some of those rights?freedom of speech speech, Takings, etc.?via the Due Process Clause, often with no reference to the Bill of Rights. So the post-New Deal Justices and their defenders asserted that the liberty of contract cases and other unenumerated rights cases involved illegitimate ?substantive due process,? while cases ?incorporating? the rights found in the Bill of Rights against the states did not.

Grounding the Due Process Clause?s substantive protections in the Bill of Rights and avoiding unenumerated rights may constrain judicial activism, but it?s still a quite literal exercise in ?substantive due process.? And given precedent going back to the 1870s implicitly acknowledging that the rights protected by the Due Process are not constrained by the Bill of Rights but apply to all arbitrary deprivations of important rights, and precedents from the 1880s holding that the criminal procedure protections of the Bill or Rights are unprotected by the Fourteenth Amendment, it?s not clear why one kind of substantive due process is inherently more legitimate than the other, or why conservatives should privilege nonsense made up by the liberal Vinson and Warren Courts.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on June 17, 2010 (boomark / email).