Wisdom, Constitutionality, and Nuclear Weapons Policy

In a well-known passage in his famous dissent in the flag-salute case of 1943, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote: Our constant preoccupation with the constitutionality of legislation rather than with its wisdom tends to preoccupation of the American mind with a false value. The tendency of focussing attention on constitutionality is to make constitutionality synonymous with wisdom, to regard a law as all right if it is constitutional. Such an attitude is a great enemy of liberalism. . . . Reliance for the most precious interests of civilization, therefore, must be found outside of their vindication in courts of law.