Liberty lost? The Supreme Court punts

A little more than 400 years ago a king of England, James I, was informed by one of his judges, Edward Coke, that while the king was under no man, he was under God and the law. This was one of the earliest and most powerful suggestions that our legal system (borrowed from the English) had, as its core principle, that there must be some restraint on arbitrary power. Ours is supposed to be a government, as John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, of laws and not of men. What the health care ruling means to you In what will go down as one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the 21st century, a majority of the justices have affirmed that most noble and important of Anglo-American legal maxims.