“In fact, it's easy enough to show, and it's impossible to refute, that a dollar is a specific silver coin containing three hundred seventy-one and a quarter grains of fine silver. It's always been that way, at least since the beginning of the American Republic. The Constitution fixes the monetary unit of the United States as this dollar, and it empowers Congress to coin silver and gold coins, the values of which have to be regulated in relation to the dollar. And it very specifically prohibits the government from issuing what the Founding Fathers called "bills of credit" – what we would call today paper currency that's redeemable in silver or gold. And the Constitution also outlaws any form of legal tender except silver and gold coins. Thus, from the perspective of the Constitution and most of American history, it is really senseless to talk about making the dollar redeemable, or to talk about adopting a silver- or a gold-backed dollar. The very fact that so much debate on the Federal Reserve system focuses on this really senseless point demonstrates how totally ignorant most of the people are about the subject of American money.”
~ Edwin Vieira Jr.
Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School). For more than thirty years he has practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors, may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their employment. He has written numerous monographs and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county. His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volume Pieces of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective.