Rights on Paper

1Picture a man standing on a hillside of gray mud. He holds a shovel. He is digging for a dark, heavy rock called coltan. He is paid about forty dollars a month. The hill is above a town called Rubaya, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a large country in the middle of Africa. It rains most afternoons.

2Coltan matters because a metal called tantalum comes out of it. Tantalum goes into tiny parts called capacitors. A capacitor holds a small amount of electricity and lets it out evenly, so that a computer chip never loses power, even for a moment. The computers that run artificial intelligence, or AI, are full of these parts. One rack, a tall shelf of computers, can hold thousands of them. About forty percent of the world's coltan comes from Congo, and nearly all of it is dug by hand.

3At the edge of the pit stands another man. He has a notebook. He works for an armed group that took control of Rubaya in 2024. He writes down the weight of every sack, and he collects a tax on every kilo that leaves the ground. The sacks are carried over the border into Rwanda. There, the paperwork is changed. The rock is now called "Rwandan." From that point on, every document says the rock is clean.

4The big technology companies have rules against buying minerals from armed groups. They hire auditors, people whose job is to check. But the auditors check the smelter, the factory where rock from hundreds of mines is melted together into one batch of metal. Once the metal is melted, no test in the world can tell which mine any piece of it came from. So the auditors read the paperwork, and the paperwork is in order, because it was changed at the border. In June 2026, a watchdog group called Global Witness traced more than two thousand tons of this rock into the supply chains of some of the largest companies on earth, among them Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia, the company whose chips train nearly every large AI model.

5On January 27, 2026, a news crew filmed the miners at Rubaya. One of them, Hakizimana Damaru, had worked on the mountain for five years. The work, he said, had given him a house, land to farm, and children in school. The next afternoon, after days of rain, the hillside gave way and buried the pits. Hundreds of people died: miners, children, and the women who sold food at the market. Hakizimana is among the missing. Five weeks later, a second slide at a nearby site killed more than two hundred more, about seventy of them children. Shipments paused for the funerals, and the price of the rock went up ten percent in a week.

6Who is responsible? The miner said that his part ends at the edge of the pit. He digs, he sells, and what happens after that is decided above him. He is right. The price, the tax, the border, the paperwork, the audit, and the rack are all decided by people far away, and each of them could answer for it. So far, the people with the most power have answered with a form, filled out truthfully. The miners have answered with their lives.

7Somewhere in the rows of tiny parts on a server board is rock from Rubaya. No test could ever point to the piece. The odds say it is there.

This is a short, simpler telling of a longer article on this site. The full piece, with its sources, the video from the terraces, and a list of the minerals one by one, is here: From Rubaya to Rack.

1Early on the morning of June 3, 1961, someone broke into a pool hall in Panama City, Florida. A cigarette machine and a jukebox were broken open, and some money and a few bottles were gone. A young man told the police that he had seen Clarence Earl Gideon leaving the building that morning with a bottle of wine in his hand and his pockets full of change.

2Gideon was fifty-one years old. He had left school after the eighth grade. He had drifted from town to town for most of his life, and he had been in prison before. He was poor. When he came into the courtroom for his trial, he had no lawyer, because he could not pay for one.

3Gideon stood up and asked the judge to appoint a lawyer for him. The judge said no. Under Florida law at that time, the court gave a free lawyer only to a person charged with a crime that could bring the death penalty. Breaking into a pool hall was not that kind of crime. Gideon would have to defend himself.

4He tried. He questioned the witnesses. He made a closing speech to the jury. But he did not know the rules of a trial, and the young man's story stood. The jury found Gideon guilty, and the judge sent him to prison for five years.

5In prison, Gideon went to the library. He read law books. Then he took a pencil and lined paper and wrote a letter to the Supreme Court of the United States. The letter was five pages long, printed in careful capital letters. It said that the state of Florida had denied him a fair trial, because the Constitution promises the help of a lawyer, and he had been refused one.

6Thousands of prisoners write to the Supreme Court every year. Almost all of the letters are turned down. Gideon's was not. The Court agreed to hear his case, and it appointed a famous Washington lawyer, Abe Fortas, to argue for him.

7On March 18, 1963, the Court ruled for Gideon, and every one of the nine justices agreed. Justice Hugo Black wrote that in our courts a lawyer is a necessity, not a luxury, and that a poor person put on trial without one cannot be sure of a fair trial. The ruling did not apply to Gideon alone. From that day on, every state had to provide a lawyer to any person charged with a serious crime who could not afford one.

8Gideon got a new trial. This time he had a lawyer, a local man named Fred Turner, who found the holes in the young witness's story. The jury talked for about an hour and found Gideon not guilty. He walked out of the courtroom a free man. He had spent two years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and he had changed the law for everyone who came after him.

1On the afternoon of May 23, 1957, three police officers knocked on the door of a two-family house on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. Dollree Mapp lived upstairs with her young daughter. The officers said they were looking for a man wanted in a bombing case, and they thought he might be hiding inside. They asked to come in.

2Mapp did not open the door. She called her lawyer on the phone, and he told her what to say. She came back and told the officers that she would let them in if they showed her a search warrant, the paper a judge signs to give the police permission to search a home. The officers did not have one. They stood outside and watched the house.

3About three hours later, more police cars arrived. There were at least seven officers now. They forced open a back door and came up the stairs. Mapp met them and again demanded to see the warrant. One officer held up a piece of paper. Mapp grabbed it and stuffed it down the front of her dress. The officers wrestled with her, took the paper back, put handcuffs on her, and made her sit on her bed while they searched every room of her home.

4They did not find the man they said they were looking for. In a trunk in the basement they found a few books and drawings that the law of Ohio at that time called obscene. Mapp said the trunk belonged to a man who had rented a room from her and moved out. It did not matter. She was arrested, tried, and found guilty of possessing obscene material, and she was sentenced to as long as seven years in prison.

5At her trial, the police never produced the paper the officer had held up. No search warrant was ever found. The court convicted her anyway.

6Mapp appealed, and her case went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. In June 1961, the Court threw out her conviction. Justice Tom Clark wrote for the Court. The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches, he said, and a search of a home without a warrant is unreasonable. But a rule with no penalty is only words. So the Court set a penalty: when the police break the rule, whatever they find cannot be used against the person in court. This is called the exclusionary rule, because the evidence is excluded, kept out. Federal courts had followed the rule since 1914. Now every state court had to follow it too.

7The men who forced Dollree Mapp's door were looking for someone else. What they found had nothing to do with a bombing. But because they searched without a warrant, the case against her fell apart, and the rule that protects every home in the country grew stronger. Mapp later moved to New York, and she died there in 2014, at the age of ninety-one.

1On June 8, 1964, in the small copper-mining town of Globe, Arizona, a woman named Mrs. Cook picked up her telephone and heard a boy's voice saying rude things. She called the sheriff. That afternoon a deputy picked up two boys, Ronald Lewis and Gerald Gault, who was fifteen years old. Gerald's parents were both at work. No one called them. No one left a note at the house.

2When Gerald's mother came home that evening, he was gone. She sent his older brother out to look for him. From the Lewis family she finally learned that Gerald was locked in the county's detention home for children. She went there at once. A probation officer told her there would be a hearing the next day.

3The hearing was held in the judge's office. Mrs. Cook, the woman who had made the complaint, was not there. No one wrote down what was said. Gerald had no lawyer, and no one told him or his parents that he could have one. The judge asked Gerald questions. Gerald said he had dialed the number but that his friend had done the talking. The judge sent him back to the detention home.

4A week later there was a second hearing. Mrs. Cook was absent again. At the end of it, the judge declared Gerald a "delinquent child" and ordered him sent to the Arizona State Industrial School "for the period of his minority," which meant until his twenty-first birthday. Gerald was fifteen. The sentence could last six years.

5If an adult had made the same phone call, the most the law of Arizona allowed was a fifty-dollar fine or two months in jail.

6Gerald's parents could not appeal, because Arizona law gave no right of appeal from a juvenile court. So they did the one thing left. They asked the courts to order the state to show by what right it was holding their son. The case went up, and up, and in 1967 it reached the Supreme Court of the United States.

7The Court ruled for Gerald, eight to one. Justice Abe Fortas wrote the opinion. The juvenile courts, he said, had been built with good intentions. They were meant to help children rather than punish them, and so they had dropped the protections that adults got. But a child who could be locked up for six years, Fortas wrote, needed those protections at least as much as an adult. Being a boy, he said, does not justify a kangaroo court, a court where the result is decided before the case is heard. From then on, a young person facing a juvenile court had the right to be told the charge, to have a lawyer, to face and question the witness who accused him, and to refuse to answer questions that could be used against him.

8Gerald Gault did not serve six years. He was released long before the Supreme Court ruled, and as a grown man he served in the Army. The phone call took a few minutes. The case that came out of it is still the rule in every juvenile court in America.

1Richard Loving was a bricklayer. Mildred Jeter had grown up a few miles from him in Central Point, a farming corner of Caroline County, Virginia, where Black, white, and Native American families had lived and worked side by side for generations. Richard was white. Mildred was Black and Native American. They fell in love. In June 1958 they drove north to Washington, D.C., got married, and drove home. They hung the marriage certificate on their bedroom wall.

2In Virginia, their marriage was a crime. A state law from 1924 made it illegal for a white person to marry anyone who was not white. The law even made it a crime to leave the state to marry and then come back.

3Five weeks after the wedding, at about two in the morning, the sheriff and two deputies opened the Lovings' unlocked front door, walked into their bedroom, and shone flashlights in their faces. The sheriff asked Richard who the woman in the bed was. "I'm his wife," Mildred said. Richard pointed at the certificate on the wall. The sheriff said that paper was no good in Virginia. The Lovings were arrested and taken to jail. Richard was let out the next day. Mildred, who was pregnant, was held for several more nights.

4In January 1959 they pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced them to a year in prison, then suspended the sentence on one condition: they had to leave Virginia, together, for twenty-five years. So they moved to Washington. They lived in a cousin's house in the city and missed the fields, the family, and the quiet. Mildred could not go home to visit her mother without breaking the law.

5In 1963, Mildred sat down and wrote a letter to the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy. She asked whether the new civil rights laws could help her family come home. Kennedy wrote back and told her to contact the American Civil Liberties Union. Two young lawyers took the case for free.

6The lawyers asked the Virginia judge to cancel the sentence. He refused. God, the judge wrote, had made the races and placed them on separate continents, and the fact that He had separated them showed He did not mean for them to mix. The lawyers took the case up to the Supreme Court of the United States. Richard did not go to Washington for the argument. He gave the lawyers one message to carry to the justices: tell the Court I love my wife, and it is not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.

7On June 12, 1967, the Court ruled for the Lovings, and all nine justices agreed. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the freedom to marry is one of the basic rights of a free person, and that a state cannot take it away because of race. Virginia's law, he said, denied the Lovings the equal protection of the laws and took their liberty without due process. The same day, the marriage laws of sixteen states stopped being enforceable.

8The Lovings went home to Caroline County. Richard built a house for his family with his own hands. He died in a car crash in 1975. Mildred lived in that house for the rest of her life. In the few interviews she gave, she said that they had not set out to change anything. They had wanted to go home.

1In the 1880s, San Francisco had about three hundred and twenty laundries. Most of them were small businesses run by Chinese immigrants, in wooden buildings, because nearly every building in the city was made of wood. The work was hard: washing by hand, boiling water, ironing all day and into the night. For Chinese men who had been shut out of most other trades, a laundry was a way to make a living.

2Anti-Chinese feeling ran high in California. In 1882, Congress passed a law that stopped almost all Chinese immigration and said that Chinese immigrants already in the country could never become citizens. In San Francisco, the city government looked for ways to drive the laundries out of business.

3In 1880 the city passed a rule. Anyone who wanted to run a laundry in a wooden building had to get permission from the Board of Supervisors. The rule said nothing about race. On its face it was about fire safety, and it applied to everyone.

4Then the Board began to decide. About two hundred Chinese laundry owners applied for permission. Every one was refused. About eighty owners who were not Chinese applied. All but one were approved.

5One of the refused laundries was called Yick Wo. Its owner, Lee Yick, had run it for twenty-two years, and he had certificates from the fire inspector and the health inspector saying his building was safe. He was refused anyway. He kept working. He was arrested, tried, and fined ten dollars. He refused to pay the fine, went to jail, and sued the sheriff, Peter Hopkins, for holding him without lawful cause.

6The city's lawyers argued that the rule was fair and that the Board could decide as it pleased. Lee Yick's lawyers pointed to the numbers: two hundred refused on one side, seventy-nine approved on the other.

7In 1886 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled for Lee Yick, and every justice agreed. Justice Stanley Matthews wrote the opinion. A law can be fair on its face, he wrote, and still be unfair in the way it is applied. If the people who enforce it use it with "an evil eye and an unequal hand," so that one group is denied what another group is granted, then the law as applied denies equal protection, and the Constitution forbids it.

8Then Matthews wrote the sentence the case is remembered for. The Fourteenth Amendment, he said, protects all persons within the country, without regard to race, color, or nationality. It does not say "all citizens." Lee Yick could not become a citizen; the law of 1882 made sure of that. He was protected anyway, because he was a person, and he was here.

9That ruling is still the law. A city, a state, or a federal officer cannot take a rule that looks neutral and use it against one group of people. And the protection reaches everyone inside the country's borders, whatever their papers say, or whether they have papers at all.

1Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873, in rooms above his father's shop on Sacramento Street, a few blocks from the waterfront. His parents had come from China. They were merchants, not citizens; under the law of the time, no Chinese immigrant could become one. But their son was born on American ground, and that, he would later argue, made him an American.

2He grew up in the city and became a cook. In 1890 his parents went back to China for good. He visited them there, and when he sailed home to San Francisco the customs officers let him in without trouble. He carried a paper signed by three white witnesses swearing that he had been born in the city.

3In 1894 he sailed to China again to see his family. He came back the next summer on a steamship called the Coptic. This time the customs collector refused to let him off the ship. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States, and the collector said Wong was Chinese, whatever his birthplace. Wong was held on ships in the bay, one after another, for about five months, in sight of the city where he was born.

4A Chinese community association hired lawyers, and the lawyers asked a federal court to order him released. The government's lawyers welcomed the fight. They wanted the Supreme Court to rule that the child of Chinese parents was not a citizen, no matter where the child was born. If they won, the ruling would reach every such child in the country.

5The case turned on one sentence. The Fourteenth Amendment, written after the Civil War to make citizens of the people who had been enslaved, begins: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." The government argued that the children of Chinese parents were not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, because their parents still owed loyalty to the emperor of China. Wong's lawyers answered that jurisdiction means the reach of the law. If the law of the United States applied to him, and it did, then he was subject to its jurisdiction, and the sentence made him a citizen.

6In March 1898, the Supreme Court ruled for Wong Kim Ark, six to two. Justice Horace Gray wrote that the rule was old, older than the country itself: a child born within a nation's borders is that nation's citizen, with only a few exceptions, such as the children of foreign ambassadors. The Fourteenth Amendment had written that rule into the Constitution, and it made no exception for race or for the parents' nationality.

7Wong Kim Ark went ashore. He traveled to China and back several more times in his life. Each time, the customs officers questioned him, and each time he had to prove again that he was who he said he was. But he was a citizen, and so were his children, and so was every child born in the country after him.

8In January 2025, on his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an order declaring that children born in the United States to parents who were here without permission, or only for a short time, would no longer be citizens. Families and states sued at once. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court struck the order down, six to three, and the Chief Justice's opinion rested on Wong Kim Ark. The rule of 1898 held. New orders followed that summer, looking for a narrower way around the ruling, and the argument goes on. But as of this reading, the sentence still means what Wong's lawyers said it meant in 1895: born here, a citizen.

1Fred Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, in 1919. His parents ran a flower nursery. He went to Oakland High School, played football, and after graduation he worked as a welder in the shipyards. He was an American citizen by birth. He had never been to Japan.

2On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the Second World War. Within days, Fred lost his shipyard job because of his ancestry. In February 1942, the President signed an order that allowed the Army to remove anyone it chose from the West Coast. The Army chose everyone of Japanese ancestry: about 120,000 people, two-thirds of them American citizens. They were given days to sell or abandon their homes, farms, and businesses, and they were sent to camps inland, behind barbed wire, guarded by soldiers.

3Fred's parents and brothers reported as ordered. Fred did not. He was twenty-three. He had a girlfriend, an Italian American named Ida, and he did not see why the government could take him from his home when it was not taking her. He changed his name, said he was of Spanish and Hawaiian descent, and had a small operation on his eyelids to look less Japanese. It did not work. On May 30, 1942, he was arrested on a street corner in San Leandro.

4In jail, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union came to see him and asked whether he would be willing to make his arrest a test of the whole removal. Fred said yes. He was convicted of violating the Army's order and sent to join his family, first in horse stalls at a racetrack south of San Francisco, then in a camp in the Utah desert.

5His case reached the Supreme Court in 1944. In December of that year, the Court ruled against him, six to three. Justice Hugo Black wrote that the country was at war, that the Army had judged the removal a military necessity, and that the Court would not second-guess it. Three justices dissented. One of them, Justice Frank Murphy, wrote that the removal fell into what he called "the ugly abyss of racism." Another, Justice Robert Jackson, warned that the decision left a dangerous principle in the law, ready for any future government to pick up.

6Fred went back to ordinary life. He married, raised two children, and worked as a draftsman. He rarely spoke about the case, even to his children.

7Then, in the early 1980s, a legal historian found documents in government files that had been kept from the Supreme Court in 1944: reports from the Navy, the FBI, and the government's own intelligence officers saying that Japanese Americans posed no danger, and a memo from the government's own lawyers warning that the Army's report on the removal contained "intentional falsehoods." Fred's lawyers went back to court. In November 1983, a federal judge in San Francisco threw out his conviction, forty-one years after his arrest. Fred, then sixty-four, told the judge that he would like the government to admit it had done wrong.

8In 1988, Congress did. It passed a law that apologized for the removal and paid twenty thousand dollars to each survivor. In 1998, President Clinton gave Fred the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Fred Korematsu died in 2005. The 1944 decision was never formally overturned by the Court that made it, but in 2018 the Chief Justice wrote that it had been "gravely wrong the day it was decided." The words that may matter most are still Jackson's, from 1944: a principle like this one, once a court approves it, lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for any hand that can claim an urgent need.

1Benjamin Gitlow was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment shops of New York. He grew up in the Bronx, joined the Socialist Party as a young man, and in 1917 the voters of his Bronx district elected him to the New York State Assembly. He was twenty-six.

2In 1919, the year after the First World War ended, the country was frightened. Revolution had taken Russia. Strikes shut down steel mills and, for a few days, the whole city of Seattle. Bombs were mailed to public officials. The government answered with raids, mass arrests, and deportations. The time was called the Red Scare.

3That summer, Gitlow and his allies broke away from the Socialist Party and published a long statement of their beliefs called the "Left Wing Manifesto." It ran in a newspaper Gitlow managed. It called for the workers of the world to rise up, take over the government, and replace it with rule by the working class. It did not name a date. It did not tell anyone to pick up a weapon. It argued.

4New York had a law from 1902, passed after an anarchist shot President McKinley, that made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government by force. In November 1919, Gitlow was arrested under it. At his trial his lawyer was Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in America. Darrow argued that a pamphlet of ideas, with no plan and no act behind it, could not be a crime. The jury convicted Gitlow anyway. He was sentenced to five to ten years, and he went to Sing Sing.

5Here is the puzzle that made his case famous. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It says Congress. New York is not Congress. For more than a century, the courts had held that the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government, and that a state could restrict speech as it pleased, so long as its own constitution allowed it.

6Gitlow's lawyers argued that this had changed in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment forbade any state to deprive any person of liberty without due process of law. Freedom of speech, they said, is part of "liberty." If a state takes it away, the state violates the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Supreme Court can stop it.

7In June 1925, the Supreme Court ruled against Gitlow, seven to two. The majority said that a state could punish speech that tended toward the violent overthrow of the government, even without proof that anyone had been moved to act. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes disagreed. Every idea is an incitement, he wrote; the only question is whether the speech is likely to cause harm now, and this manifesto was not.

8Gitlow lost. But in the middle of the majority's opinion sat one sentence that changed American law. The Court said it would "assume" that the freedom of speech and of the press are among the liberties the Fourteenth Amendment protects from the states. For the first time, the Court had said that a right in the Bill of Rights applied against a state. In the decades that followed, the Court used that sentence again and again, right by right: speech, press, religion, the right to a lawyer, the right against unreasonable searches. The cases of Clarence Gideon and Dollree Mapp, earlier in this handout, both depend on it.

9Six months after the ruling, Governor Al Smith of New York pardoned Gitlow. Smith said the pardon did not mean that he agreed with Gitlow's ideas. It meant that keeping him in prison any longer would protect no one. Gitlow went home to the Bronx. He had served about three years.

1Chickasaw, Alabama, was a town in every way but one. It had streets and sidewalks, a business block with stores, a post office, houses, a sewer system, and a policeman. Its people came and went, and the highway ran through it. Anyone could drive in. The one difference was this: the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation owned all of it. The land, the houses, the stores, the sidewalks. The policeman was a deputy sheriff whose pay came from the company.

2In the middle of the Second World War, a woman named Grace Marsh came to Chickasaw. She was a Jehovah's Witness, and her faith asked her to go from town to town handing out its magazines and talking with whoever would listen. She stood on the sidewalk near the post office and offered her papers to the people walking by.

3The company had posted signs: this was private property, and no one could solicit without written permission. The deputy told Marsh she needed a permit. She asked for one. He told her that no permit would be given. He told her to leave. She said she believed the Constitution gave her the right to stand there, and she stayed. She was arrested and charged with trespass, the crime of staying on someone's property after being told to go.

4Alabama's courts found her guilty, and their reasoning was simple. The First Amendment protects speech and religion against the government. The Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation was not the government. It was an owner, and an owner can tell a visitor to leave.

5The case reached the Supreme Court in 1945, and the question was new. The Court had already held, in Gitlow's case and the cases after it, that a state could not silence speech. But this was a company. Could a corporation that owned a whole town do what a town government could not?

6In January 1946 the Court said no, five to three. Justice Hugo Black wrote the opinion. Chickasaw, he pointed out, worked exactly like any other American town. Its people bought their food there, got their mail there, and learned what they knew of the world on its streets. If the company could shut Grace Marsh out, it could shut out any newspaper, any preacher, any speaker it disliked, and the people who lived there would hear only what the company allowed. The more an owner opens his property to the public for his own advantage, Black wrote, the more his rights as an owner give way to the rights of the people who use it. Marsh's conviction was thrown out.

7The ruling was narrow. It did not say that the First Amendment applies to every private business. It said that when a private owner takes on the whole work of a town, the owner takes on the town's limits too. In the decades since, the Court has kept the rule small. A shopping mall is not a town, it said in 1972. A company's website, the courts have said so far, is not a town either.

8So here is where things stand. The rights in this handout are rights against the government: the sheriff, the judge, the customs collector, the Army. They are not, in general, rights against your employer, your landlord, or the company that runs the app you speak on. Grace Marsh's case is the exception that shows the shape of the rule, and it is the case people go back to, again and again, when they ask whether a private power has grown large enough to be treated like a public one.

1In the 1890s, a bakery was one of the worst places in America to work. Most bakeries were in cellars, because rent was cheap there and the ovens needed a floor that would not burn. The air was thick with flour dust and heat. Bakers worked through the night, so that bread would be ready at dawn, and they worked as long as the owner needed them: fourteen hours, sixteen hours, sometimes more. Many slept in the cellar between shifts. In 1894 a New York reporter walked through the cellar bakeries of the city and described the rats, the damp, and the coughing men.

2The bakers had a union, and it had been asking for a shorter day for years. In 1895, with the reporter's stories fresh, the New York legislature passed the Bakeshop Act. It set rules for cleanliness and ventilation, and it set a limit on hours: no employee in a bakery could work more than ten hours a day or sixty hours a week.

3Joseph Lochner owned a small bakery in Utica, in upstate New York. He was an immigrant from Germany, and he ran the shop with a few employees. In 1902 he was charged with letting one of them, a baker named Aman Schmitter, work more than sixty hours in a week. It was his second offense. He was fined fifty dollars. He refused to pay, and his case went up.

4Lochner's argument was this. The Fourteenth Amendment says that no state may deprive any person of liberty without due process of law. Liberty, he said, includes the freedom to make a contract: a baker who wants to work seventy hours, and an owner who wants to pay him for seventy hours, have a right to agree to it. The state had no business getting between them.

5The state's argument was health. A legislature has the power to protect the safety and health of its people, and the hours law was a health law, passed after the legislature had seen the evidence.

6In April 1905 the Supreme Court ruled for Lochner, five to four. Justice Rufus Peckham wrote the opinion. The Constitution, he said, protects the "liberty of contract," and a state may interfere with it only for a real health reason. Baking, he decided, was not an unhealthy enough trade to justify one. The law, he wrote, was really an attempt to regulate labor, and that was not the state's business.

7Four justices disagreed. Justice John Marshall Harlan listed the medical evidence about flour dust and the lungs of bakers and asked how the majority could know better than the legislature. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a short, sharp dissent. The Constitution, he said, does not take sides in an argument about economics. A state has the right to try an experiment like this one, and the Court has no right to strike it down because the justices prefer a different theory. Otherwise, he wrote, the majority was reading its own economic views into an amendment that said nothing about them.

8For the next thirty years, the Court used the same idea to strike down laws across the country: minimum wage laws, and laws protecting workers who joined a union. Workers had won those laws through strikes, elections, and campaigns. Judges took them away in the name of liberty.

9Then, in 1937, in the middle of the Great Depression, the Court reversed itself. It upheld a minimum wage law for women, and two weeks later it upheld the National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that gives workers the right to organize a union and bargain with their employer. Holmes's dissent had become the law. Today, "Lochner" is a word lawyers use for a court that mistakes its own opinions for the Constitution.

10The word "liberty" was on both sides of this case. Lochner's lawyers meant the owner's freedom to set the hours. The bakers meant the freedom to go home. The Constitution does not say which one it means. People decide that, one case at a time.

1On the night of May 15, 2010, Kalief Browder, sixteen years old, was walking home from a party in the Belmont section of the Bronx with a friend. A police car pulled up. The officers said that a man had accused the two of them of robbing him. At first the man said it had happened that night. Then he said it had happened two weeks before. The police searched Kalief and found nothing. They arrested him anyway.

2The charge was robbery: a backpack with a camera, some money, and a credit card inside. Kalief said he had not done it. He was taken to Rikers Island, the jail complex in the East River where the city holds people who are waiting for trial. A judge set bail at three thousand dollars, which his family could not raise. Then, because Kalief was on probation from an earlier incident, a judge ordered him held without bail at all. So he waited.

3The Sixth Amendment promises a speedy trial. New York's own law says the prosecution must be ready for trial within six months in a felony case. But the six months count only the delays the law blames on the prosecutors. Every time a prosecutor stood up and said "not ready," the case was adjourned, put off, for weeks or months. Then it was the court that had no time. Then a prosecutor was on vacation. Kalief's case was adjourned more than thirty times. Six months became a year. A year became two.

4Rikers was violent. Guards and other inmates beat him; some of the beatings were later shown on the news, from the jail's own cameras. Because of fights, he was sent to solitary confinement, a cell where a person is kept alone for twenty-three hours a day. He spent close to two of his three years there. More than once he tried to end his life, and each time he was returned to the cell.

5Again and again, the prosecutors offered a deal: plead guilty and go home, with time served. Kalief said no every time. He had not done it, he said, and he would not say that he had.

6In May 2013, after more than three years, the prosecutors told the court that their witness had left the country and could not be found. They dropped the case. Kalief was twenty years old. He walked out with no conviction, no trial, and no apology.

7He tried to rebuild. He earned his GED and enrolled at Bronx Community College. A magazine writer named Jennifer Gonnerman told his story, and the story spread. He gave interviews and said that he wanted the system changed so that no one else would go through it. But the years at Rikers had done their damage, and in June 2015, at twenty-two, he took his own life.

8What came afterward was a list of changes with his name attached. The President wrote about him. The city ended solitary confinement for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds at Rikers. New York raised the age at which a person is tried as an adult from sixteen to eighteen. In 2019 the state rewrote its bail law so that most people charged with nonviolent crimes could no longer be jailed for lack of money, and it rewrote its speedy-trial law so that prosecutors could no longer say "ready" without meaning it. The city voted to close Rikers Island. The city paid his family a settlement of more than three million dollars.

9The rights in this handout are written down. Kalief Browder had every one of them: the right to a lawyer, the right to a trial, the right to a speedy one, the right against excessive bail. He had them on paper. What he did not have was a system that kept its promises to a sixteen-year-old from the Bronx who could not pay three thousand dollars. The Constitution is only as good as the people and the systems that carry it out. His story is here because it is the nearest one to us, and because it is not finished.

This reading includes a suicide. If it stirs something painful for you, talk with your teacher, or call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour.

1Twelve readings, and in every one but the first, the person on the other side of the case was a government: a sheriff, a judge, a school for delinquent boys, a customs collector, a Board of Supervisors, the Army, a state legislature, a jail. That is not an accident. The Constitution names governments. Its rights are rights against them.

2But most of us spend most of our waking hours under a different power. An employer decides when we work, what we may say on the job, whether our bag or our phone can be searched, and whether we keep the job. A landlord decides who lives where. A handful of companies own the places where most of the country now talks, reads the news, and looks for work. None of them is a government. The First Amendment does not stop a boss from firing you for what you said. The Fourth does not stop a store from searching your bag at the door. There is no Sixth Amendment hearing before a platform closes your account.

3The rights that workers do have against employers come from somewhere else: from laws passed by Congress and the states. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gives workers the right to organize a union. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 sets a minimum wage and the forty-hour week the bakers of Utica wanted. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 gives you the right to a workplace that will not injure you. These are real rights, and they were won the way the bakers' law was won, by organizing and voting. But they are statutes, ordinary laws, not amendments. A majority in Congress can weaken them, and has. They can be enforced badly, and are.

4And then there is the man on the hill in Rubaya, under a power that is neither a government nor an ordinary employer, with no court to write to at all.

5So here is the question. When a private power grows large enough to run the places where people work and speak, should the rights in the Constitution reach it? Two writers answer below. The passages were written for this handout, one for each side, so that you can weigh them. Read both. Then do what the test asks: decide which argument is better supported, and show your evidence.