My Years in the Supreme Court continues....

What seemed to some of us a dangerous precedent lay rather in the fact that the First Amendment protected certain specified statutes passed by various State legislatures against attack for unconstitutionality before the Court. Of course Indian Parliament had not gone—thanks to the Constitution itself—to the lengths to which the U. S. Congress had once proceeded when it had taken a case already before the Court away from it! As the protected statutes mostly concerned existing rights in land which the government was modifying and in some States even entirely extinguishing, this provision seemed to some of us to be a sad failure on the part of the legislative draftsmen ill clothing the intentions of the legislature in proper statutory form!

To be continued...