Comparison of the Trustees of Dartmouth When the Constitution was in its early stages of development, which consisted of numerous crude drafts and many days of delegation, the Founding Fathers envisioned that their end result would be much more than a piece of paper binding the citizens of their country. After finally agreeing on many issues to form a central platform, the Fathers inked their ideas into articles that were to be the very foundation of not only the Constitution, but America as well. The dead men who ratified this Constitution felt that not only should it be a supreme legal document whose laws would be of the highest authority, but also more importantly, the words of the Constitution should be able to withstand the advent of time. What the Fathers did not foresee, and therefore did not ink, was that as time changes, so do the interests of society. The country we live in today far differs from the life of eighteenth-century America. Because of this slow, yet radical and drastic change, some of the words of the Constitution are being challenge by its citizens because the Articles and Amendments are either too vague or do not really conform to today’s environment.One of the clauses that has been frequently attacked in the Supreme Court is the so-called contract clause. In Section 10 of Article I, the Constitution states, “No State shall…pass any Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” In layman’s terms, a state’s legislature has no power to pass any law that would affect contracts. The initial problem of the contract clause the Supreme Court had to face was that they had to define what contracts – private, public, or both- were to be protected by the Constitution, but as the interests and health of citizens began to shift, the Justices’ definition and the words of the contract clause had to be bent and reinterpreted to better serve the public. Although the Court ...
