The men he picked as federal judges in the South developed new constitutional doctrine in case after case during the civil rights era, and the Supreme Court signaled its general support.
The Stoic doctrine of case is one of those areas where there is as yet little consensus.
Most Republicans defended Mr. Smith today, calling his positions "well-grounded in mainstream First Amendment doctrines and case law," as Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, put it.
Bentham went farther and argued that a system in which judges allegedly developed legal doctrine on a case-by-case basis was also not capable of guiding the conduct of persons to whom it applied and therefore did not qualify as law.
The Supreme Court reversed a decades-long legal doctrine with the case, which grew out of a lawsuit filed by a California company, Independent Ink, claiming that a unit of Illinois Tool Works had illegally required buyers of its patented printheads to use its ink to fill them.
A complex web of recent constitutional doctrine surrounds this case, Tennessee v. Lane, No. 02-1667.
Although the defendant is a publicly traded US corporation, the trial court, applying the doctrine, dismissed the case because to try it "would require the judiciary to question actual, sensitive judgments made by the military, which the Court is not permitted to do".
The Supreme Court is still assembling its docket for this term and will have an opportunity to consider the administration's enemy-combatant doctrine in the case of Yasser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen of Saudi descent apparently captured on the battlefield in the Afghan war.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that "the government is not liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries to servicemen" arising from their military service, and the court has repeatedly reaffirmed this principle, known as the Feres doctrine after the case that established it.
The decision came less than two weeks after the Supreme Court upheld the first sale doctrine in the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, about a student who was importing and selling textbooks that he had bought at a lower price overseas.
