
Lincoln and the Broken Constitution
The Lawfare Podcast
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Is There a Moral Duty to Keep Promises in the Constitution?
Lincoln reformed the basic character of the constitution from a kind of compromise about slavery that you might think as a moral. Once slavery was out of the constitution and we could add the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, guarantees of equal protection and due process of law applied not only to the government, but against the states,. then our constitution embodied a principle that i think we would recognize as moral. There's a reason that over the supreme court building we have the phrase, equal justice under law. It's a moral aspiration that goes beyond just the principle of rule following. Both sides are right to talk of the constitution as a morally aspirational document. And in that sense he
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