« Texas Post-Election Note | Main | This is Huge »

November 12, 2006

Two Justices in Need of Leaving

One of the important characteristics of a legal system like ours is consistency: we allow a great deal of latitude to judges, rather than specifying everything as the French system (for example) does, but in return we expect that the judges will change things only very slowly, and in particular will rely greatly on precedent and well-established legal maxims. Our Supreme Court has, over the past 70 years, repeatedly, frequently and almost maliciously violated this bedrock principle of justice, primarily due to agenda-based judicial decision making.

When what matters is getting the right outcome, you get Justices like Ginsberg and Stevens, who voted in Raich that an activity that entirely occurred in one state and involved no exchange of value was interstate commerce, and thus could be regulated by the Federal government, while other activities taking place in a state and not involving an exchange of values (in this case, partial birth abortions) are not interstate commerce and not subject to Federal regulation. This is, to be blunt, simply making up judicial reasoning to back up the outcome you prefer in the first place.

At this point, I would seriously consider staffing the Supreme Court by just randomly drafting people, like for a jury pool, to 2-to-5 year terms. I suspect we'd get better judicial reasoning, and more consistency, than we have now.

Posted by jeff at November 12, 2006 6:20 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/2383

Comments

I'm similarly annoyed at the lack of consistency. What I'd like to see is each justice given a single term on the bench of 9 years. You get one confirmation per year, and a rotating court. Also, the Judiciary Committee should be given a 50-50 split, not to the party in charge of the Senate.

Posted by: Mark L [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 12, 2006 6:52 PM