Lynch v. Overholser

Eighty-seven years ago, Chief Justice Waite in speaking of the function of this Court said: “Our province is to decide what the law is, not to declare what it should be ... . If the law is wrong, it ought to be changed; but the power for that is not with us.” Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 178 (1875). This holding followed as long a line of cases as it preceded. Today the Court seems to me to do what this long-established rule of statutory interpretation forbids. With sophisticated frankness it admits that the District’s statute1 “[b]y its plain terms . . . directs confinement in a mental…