FreedomWorks Foundation has launched a new educational program to educate our activists on the role of the judiciary and its important check on legislative and executive branch power. In addition to the new issue page and new courses for FreedomWorks University, we are including an activist education program to highlight this important issue. Recently FreedomWorks Foundation sponsored a series of talks in South Carolina and Florida that examined the role of the judiciary and the dangers of a judicial branch that fails to check the power of the other branches of government.

The U.S. Constitution attempted to create a blueprint for government that includes three co-equal branches of government: the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judiciary. While the legislature enacts laws and the executive branch implements those laws, the judiciary has the important role of checking any overreach by both the executive and legislative branches. These checks and balances are what protected the new constitutional republic from the tyranny of majority rule.

The passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly referred to as ObamaCare, stands as one of the largest expansions of the unconstitutional administrative state in the country’s history. Since the Progressive Era, the United States has been steadily drifting away from the founding-era principles of republicanism, separation of powers, and respect for the rule of law and towards an ever-expanding and overreaching government no longer abiding by its constitutional limits. Congress has repeatedly delegated its legislative authority to independent agencies and departments removed from the political process, while the judicial branch looks the other way.

A critical case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court late February that has major implications for the electric utility industry and future efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The case is called Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA and it will determine whether or not the EPA acted legally when it granted itself the authority to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from stationary emitters such as power plants.

When most people think of laws today, they think of legislation passed by Congress. Yet, the primary source of law that governs society today developed from common law. In a common law legal system, laws are developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals, rather than by legislation. A majority of the rules of contract law, tort law, property law, and criminal law evolved from common law, while legislation served to simply codify decisions or fill in areas not covered by case law.

Without question, the U.S. legal system, from the structure and operations of the judicial branch to the governing laws of the nation, was founded in the common law legal tradition. Common law, for those unfamiliar with the concept, is law that develops organically over time and is based on the accepted customs and shared values of a society. More specific to its history, common law was developed in England as it emerged from the Middle Ages, where the legal systems of the disparate regions were united by royal decrees and the decisions of judges based not on the wisdom of the given monarch or judge, but on previous decisions made in other legal cases.