Foreword.

• Author: Greaney, Justice John M.
• Position: Symposium--The Massachusetts Constitution Of 1780

This issue of the Suffolk University Law Review acknowledges, and celebrates, the 230th anniversary of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. It is appropriate to do so.

Not so long ago, state constitutions were considered static documents, principally intended to structure the branches of state government and define their authority. Where the constitutions provided guarantees for basic citizens' rights, the guarantees were considered to be limitations on the power of government. Many other rights afforded citizens in state constitutions were taken to be aspirational, subject to implementation as matter of policy by the executive and the legislature, but not as independent sources of duties that were enforceable against the executive and the legislature in the courts.

It was also thought that, when the United States Supreme Court established the federal rule on basic guarantees set forth in the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution, particularly in the areas of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, state supreme courts should adopt the federal rule under cognate provisions of their state constitutions. This analysis could be colloquially styled the "lock-step" school of interpretation.

These views, common elsewhere, were never the prevailing views when it came to the interpretation of the basic rights granted citizens in the Declaration of Rights to the Massachusetts Constitution and elsewhere in the document.

There are several reasons for this.

* The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 predated the United States Constitution by seven years and the Bill of Rights to that Constitution by eleven years. The drafters of the Massachusetts Constitution expressed what they believed were appropriate rights and guarantees for the citizens of Massachusetts based on the experiences, attitudes, and aspirations that prevailed here in 1780 without concern for what eventually might be expressed in a more expansive, unifying document, which had to take into account the differing goals of a much larger, more diverse, union of states. As Professor Robert Williams has put it:

State constitutions are sui generis, differing from the Federal Constitution in their origin, function, and form. They originate from a very different process from that which led to the Federal Constitution. State constitutions do not look or work like the Federal Constitution. They are longer, more detailed, and cover many more topics.... There are many policy decisions embedded...