The purpose of this research is to examine a hypothetical Supreme Court case study, Mayor of New York v. YIPES. The plan of the research will be to set forth the facts of the case in light of constitutional law and politics, and to refer to relevant precedents in deciding the question whether the Yale Interplanetary Peace Emergency Security Act (YIPES) is constitutional.
We may safely dispose of one ancillary question immediately, which is that in no case may an elected Congress and the president interpret the Constitution differently than the Supreme Court, the Court should comply with their view. This notion does violence to the entire conception of judicial review, first articulated in Marbury v. Madison and reinforced by a tradition that has standing not least on account of Article III's declaration that "judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution" (O'Brien 11, 33).
In this case, what we find is that executive and legislative power have been inappropriately extended to interfere with Law and Equity in direct challenge to judicial power specifically and programmatically set forth in Article III. Indeed, this case has been complicated not least by executive and legislative authorities' conflation of civil and criminal domains at both municipal and federal level. Criminal-law jurisdiction has been asserted (or abdicated) for reasons of civil law, while civil-law jurisdiction has been asserted as the basis for matters of criminal law. What is all the more remarkable about this series of assertions of governance privilege and power is that they have been made even as the government entities involved chose rather to avoid than incur the responsibilities and risks of governance. And so this remarkable case has arisen. Accordingly, we rearticulate that the power of constitutional interpretation resides supremely as it were with this Court, not with legislature or executive. More, this...