Talk:Luther v. Borden

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"Republican in nature"

The article says that:

Martin Luther contended that because the charter government was not republican in nature (it restricted the electorate to only the most propertied classes) that the Supreme Court should find in his favor and order his alternative republican government to be the government of Rhode Island, superseding the charter government.

I wonder if the parenthetical here is Luther's actual assertion as to why the Court should have found RI's govt. to be not republican -- that is, that in order to be republican it needs to be more democratic. It's not clear to me from the documents cited that that's the case. Did he perhaps mean it in a more narrow sense -- that the RI govt. still operated under the charter granted by the British King in the 17th century, and thus was not republican in the sense that it was a monarch's document? Anyone who is more familiar with the case, help me out! --Jfruh 23:15, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]