As sometimes read, these texts prove to be more capacious or commodious than earlier justices could have imagined. Thus, in the connections birth control case, justice William O. Douglas referred to various guarantees in the Bill of Rights and found in them penumbras, formed by emanations, which, in turn, contained a right of marital privacy. Three of his concurring colleagues found that right in the Ninth Amendment.
This sort of jurisprudence found no favour with Justice Hugo L. Black. He denounced it as the natural law due process [or whatever] philosophy, and in case after case, denied that the court had any such jurisdiction. If these formulas based on natural justice, or others which mean the same thing, are to prevail, they require judges to determine what is or is not constitutional on the basis of their own appraisal of what laws are unwise or unnecessary.
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