'It is manifest that it was not left to the legislative power to enact any process which might be devised. The article is a restraint on the legislative as well as on the executive and judicial powers of the government, and cannot be so construed as to leave congress free to make any process 'due process of law' by its mere will.'All persons within the territory of the United States are entitled to its protection, including corporations, aliens, and presumptively citizens seeking readmission to the United States, but States as such are not so entitled. It is effective in the District of Columbia and in territories which are part of the United States, but it does not apply of its own force to unincorporated territories. Nor does it reach enemy alien belligerents tried by military tribunals outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. Early in our judicial history, a number of jurists attempted to formulate a theory of natural rights--natural justice, which would limit the power of government, especially with regard to the property rights of persons.State courts were the arenas in which this struggle was carried out prior to the Civil War. Opposing the 'vested rights' theory of protection of property were jurists who argued first, that the written constitution was the supreme law of the State and that judicial review could look only to that document in scrutinizing legislation and not to the 'unwritten law' of 'natural rights,' and second, that the 'police power' of government enabled legislatures to regulate the use and holding of property in the public interest, subject only to the specific prohibitions of the written constitution. The 'vested rights' jurists thus found in the 'law of the land' and the 'due process' clauses of the state constitutions a restriction upon the substantive content of legislation, which prohibited, regardless of the matter of procedure, a certain kind or degree of exertion of legislative power altogether. Thus, Chief Justice Taney was not innovating when in his opinion in the Dred Scott case he pronounced, without elaboration, that one of the reasons the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional was that an act of Congress which deprived 'a citizen of his liberty or property merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.' Following the War, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, substantive due process interpretations were urged on the Supreme Court with regard to state legislation; first resisted, the arguments came in time to be accepted, and they imposed upon both federal and state legislation a firm judicial hand which was not to be removed until the crisis of the 1930's, and which today in non-economic legislation continues to be reasserted
开头的部分.
Scope of the Guaranty
Standing by itself, the phrase ''due process'' would seem to refer solely and simply to procedure, to process in court, and therefore to be so limited that ''due process of law'' would be what the legislative branch enacted it to be. But that is not the interpretation which has been placed on the term.
担保的范围从自身角度来讲, 诉讼程序只是单纯处理程序的意思. 所以法定诉讼程序就是立法部门在法院处理程序的意思. 但这不仅仅是对其字面意义上的解释.但这不是代替这个条款的解释.