Lysander Spooner



Articles by Lysander Spooner

The Problem with Federal Courts and “Sovereignty”

From Section XXIII of “A Letter to Grover Cleveland” (1886).If anything could add to the disgust and detestation which the monstrous falsifications of the constitution, already described, should excite towards the court that resorts to them, it would be the fact that the court, not content with falsifying to the utmost the constitution itself, goes outside of the constitution, to the tyrannical practices of what it calls the “sovereign” governments of “other civilized nations” to justify the same practices by our own. It asserts, over and over again, the idea that our government is a “sovereign” government; that it has the same rights of “sovereignty” as the governments of “other civilized nations”; especially those in Europe. What, then, is a “sovereign” government? It is a government

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