Constitutional Theory – Page 17

State, Means, and Ends

I am auditing Jeremy Waldron’s seminar on human dignity this semester. Since prof. Waldron’s rule is that auditors “must be seen but not heard” in class, I will use the blog as an outlet for thoughts and comments.

One thing we did in yesterday’s seminar was to go through the rights-protecting amendments to the U.S. Constitution and look for ways in which they can be said to rely on or further dignitarian ideas. It’s an interesting exercise, because it highlights the variety of these ideas, and shows how specific rights are connected to some of them, but not others. For example, dignity is associated with autonomy or self-direction, and the First Amendment’s protection of the “free exercise” of religion can be read as upholding that autonomy. Dignity is also associated with (high-status) equality, and the guarantee of the “equal protection of the laws” in the 14th amendment, or voting equality in the 15th and the 19th are related to that strand in the dignitarian thought. (Of course, a right can be related to more than one facet of the concept of dignity. For example, the prohibition of slavery in the 13th amendment is related both to autonomy and to equality.)

Now there was, as I remember it, a single section of the Bill of Rights for which no one, apparently, seemed able to come up with a dignitarian explanation: the Third Amendment, which prohibits the quartering of troops in private houses in peacetime without the consent of the owner. But I think that it can actually be related to one familiar dignitarian idea: Kant’s injunction against treating persons as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. When the government, without your consent, uses your house as improvised barracks, it treats your expense of time and/or money on building or buying and keeping up the house as means to its own ends.

The Bill of Rights contains other rights related to the same sense of dignity, notably in the Fifth Amendment, which includes protections against the taking of private property by the state without compensation and against compelled self-incrimination. (Arguably, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is rather less protective of this aspect of dignity, but it also includes a protection against compelled self-incrimination.) Yet in other ways the U.S. Constitution (as well as the Charter) countenances and arguably even requires the use of citizens as means to the government’s ends. It does not prevent the draft, for example. It also protects the right to jury trials, which means that the state must conscript citizens to serve as jury members.

I wonder what to make of this contradiction. Is it even a contradiction, or is there some broader principle, or some distinction, that I am missing? If it is, is it wrong? Can or should we do things differently? Your thoughts are very welcome.

Google as Regulator, Part Deux

A recent story, reported for example by the Globe and Mail, nicely illustrates Google’s dual, and perhaps ambiguous, role as “speaker and censor,” at once exercising, or claiming to exercise, an editorial judgment and making itself he agent of speech-restricting governments, about which I blogged some time ago. According to the Globe, “Google’s search algorithm will begin demoting websites that are frequently reported for copyright violations, a move that will likely make it more difficult to find file-sharing, Torrent and so-called file locker sites.” These websites will not be removed from search results, but they will be harder to find.

This is, it seems to me, an obvious example of “editorial judgment,” which – as I explain in more detail in the post linked to above – Google claims to exercise when designing its search algorithms. At the same time, it is an an example of Google acting, in effect, as a regulator, if not, in this case, as a censor. The decision to demote allegedly-copyright-infringing websites is not, one suspects, motivated by commercial considerations; at least not immediately commercial considerations, since, as the Globe puts it, the move “should please Hollywood” – and other content producers – and perhaps Google considers pleasing them as an investment that will pay off. Google’s state reason for this decision is that it will “help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily” (my emphasis). One usually associates concerns for legitimacy with public authorities rather than private corporations.

Indeed, some might want Google to take an even more public-spirited position. As Deven Desai, of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, notes in a post on Concurring Opinions, “this shift may open the door to more arguments for Google to be a gatekeeper and policer of content.” Indeed, although he does not favour such an approach, he points out that it is a “difficult question … why or why not act on some issues but not others.” Why, for example, copyright infringement but not hate speech? For now, even Google might lack the data and/or content-analyzing capacities effectively to recognize hate speech. But given how fast technology evolves, this might change sooner rather than later. As prof. Desai observes, if Google becomes a more overt internet regulator, it will be criticized, for example from a competition-law standpoint. But of course it will also be criticized if it refuses to take on that role.

Either way, there will be a lot of interesting questions for lawyers. At what point does Google, acting as a quasi-regulator, become a state agent subject to constitutional constraints? How does competition law, and its prohibition on abuse of a dominant position, interact with the constitutional protection of freedom of speech, if the latter encompasses Google’s freedom of editorial judgment about its algorithm? What sort of due process rights do or should people affected by Google’s editorial decisions have – and what legal framework – for example, administrative or maybe tort law – is appropriate for settling this question? This is a lot to think about. No answers from me for now.

Interpreting Interpretations

I would like to come back to the two cases I mentioned in yesterday’s post―A.-G. Canada v A.-G. Ontario, [1937] A.C. 326, better known as the Labour Conventions Reference, and Missouri v. Holland, because they might tell us something about a problem much broader than the issue (important though it is in its own right) that they addressed, the ability of a federal legislature to legislate in order to implement a treaty if similar legislation would be, in the absence of the treaty, of the resort of state or provincial legislatures. The judgments in the two cases are an interesting comparison, being authored by two of the greatest judges of their respective countries (and of the common law world), less than two decades apart – and arriving at diametrically opposed conclusions. One apparent difference between the reasons Lord Atkin and Justice Holmes give for their respective conclusions lies in the interpretive methodologies they use. Could it explain the difference of outcomes?

Lord Atkin’s discussion of s. 132 of the Constitution Act, 1867, and his dismissal of the possibility that this provision justifies Parliament’s power to legislate in order to implement a treaty is remarkably formalist/originalist. S. 132 provides that “[t]he Parliament … of Canada shall have all Powers necessary or proper for performing the Obligations of Canada or of any Province thereof, as Part of the British Empire, towards Foreign Countries, arising under Treaties between the Empire and such Foreign Countries.” The federal government argued that, in light of Canada’s accession to independence and becoming able to enter into treaties on its own (rather than as part of the Empire), which was not anticipated when the Constitution Act, 1867, was drafted and enacted, this provision should be interpreted as giving Parliament the power to implement not only imperial treaties, but also those concluded by Canada. Not so, says Lord Atkin: “it is impossible to strain the section so as to cover the uncontemplated event” (p. 7 in the document linked to). This from a body which, only a few years earlier, berated the Supreme Court of Canada for its originalism and refusal to “strain the section” in Edwards v. A.-G. Canada, [1930] A.C. 124, better known as the Persons Case, famously insisting that “The British North America Act planted in Canada a living tree capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits.”

Now I actually think that Lord Atkin could have made a plausible principled argument for why s. 132 could not be applied to treaties concluded by Canada in its own capacity. Relative to the Canadian constitutional order, imperial treaties were external events; they could be imposed on Canada, without much regard for the usual framework of Canadian federalism and democracy. So arguably it did not matter much which legislature was given the power to implement them. By contrast, the implementation of Canadian treaties, the products of Canada’s own constitution, should respect this framework. (It is perhaps for this reason that s. 132 is found among the “miscellaneous” provisions of the Constitution Act, 1867, rather than along with the distribution of legislative powers in ss. 91-95.) Indeed, Lord Atkin might be hinting at something like this argument, mentioning a “distinction between … obligations imposed upon Canada as part of the Empire by an Imperial executive responsible to and controlled by the Imperial Parliament and … obligations created by the Dominion executive responsible to and controlled by the Dominion Parliament.” But Lord Atkin says it is “unnecessary to dwell upon” this, and it seems not to be the reason for his holding concerning the meaning of s. 132, which is purely what would now be called textualist or originalist.

By contrast, Justice Holmes in Holland explicitly rejects these interpretive methodologies (at 433):

when we are dealing with words that also are a constituent act, like the Constitution of the United States, we must realize that they have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism; it has taken a century and has cost their successors much sweat and blood to prove that they created a nation. The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.

A constitution, says Justice Holmes, should be interpreted in light only of today’s practical concerns. The treaty and legislation at issue concern migratory birds,

a national interest of very nearly the first magnitude … . It can be protected only by national action in concert with that of another power. The subject-matter is only transitorily within the State and has no permanent habitat therein. But for the treaty and the statute there soon might be no birds for any powers to deal with. We see nothing in the Constitution that compels the Government to sit by while a food supply is cut off and the protectors of our forests and our crops are destroyed. (435)

(Incidentally, although I am very far from being an expert on the topic, I do not recall any attempts to engage with these arguments in the literature dealing with originalism.)

But is drawing this contrast between Lord Atkin’s and Justice Holmes’s judgments enough to say that interpretive approaches explain their contrary conclusions? It might make sense to suppose that a textualist/originalist approach to the interpretation of federalist provisions of a constitution is likely to be more favourable to state or provinces, while a practical or principled one will favour federal governments. Changes in the way our societies function (in the economic realm especially) seem to dictate larger roles for central governments at the expense of local ones. Some have characterized the Supreme Court’s ruling in Reference re Securities Act, 2011 SCC 66, [2011] 3 S.C.R. 837, declaring unconstitutional the establishment of a federal securities regulator, as impractical and stuck in the 19th century.

Yet if one looks carefully at the reasons in the Labour Conventions Reference and in Holland, things are not so neat. Justice Holmes is a textualist when he parses the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution for confirmation of the status of treaties, while Lord Atkin is mindful of principle and of practical concerns when he calls our attention to the reasons behind the federal division of powers in the Constitution Act, 1867, and insists that “[i]n totality of legislative powers, Dominion and Provincial together, [Canada] is fully equipped” (p. 10) to implement any treaty it enters into. Debating the merits, whether in terms of legitimacy or of consequences, of constitutional interpretive methodologies can be entertaining (as the American academia’s fascination with such debates attests). But it is questionable whether their real-life application is ever so pure as to make the ostensible choice of one methodology over another matter much.

Go Ask Your Mom!

Is it conceivable that states, like a child who, denied by one parent, asks the other to let them stay up late, ask around for permission to do something they would not normally be permitted? Lord Atkin enlisted the threat of such a course of action as an argument in his famous opinion for the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in The Labour Conventions Reference, writing (at p.9 in the document linked to) that “it would be remarkable that while the Dominion could not initiate legislation however desirable which affected civil rights in the provinces, yet its government … need only agree with a foreign country to enact such legislation.”

The judgment, denying Parliament the ability to enact social legislation it felt was necessary to respond to the Great Depression on the ground that such legislation was for the provinces to adopt, made a lot of people furious and, if I remember well, F.R. Scott for example criticized this suggestion as being fanciful fear-mongering. Justice Holmes, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court of the United States in Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), a case that presented much the same issue as Labour Conventions, did not even consider this question, and went on to hold – contrary to Lord Atkin and the Privy Council – that the federal legislature could legislate to implement an international treaty regardless of its (dis)ability to enact the same legislation in the absence of a treaty.

But recent developments suggest that Lord Atkin’s worry it is not so crazy anymore, if it ever was. On intellectual property for example, states (and supranational organizations such as the European Union) have apparently taken to using free-trade agreements as vehicles for smuggling into their domestic legislation restrictive rules on intellectual property which they would might find politically impossible to enact in stand-alone statutes visibly devoted to this purpose, as University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist has detailed in a series of blog posts.

Of course, there is a crucial difference between this example and the Labour Conventions case. The impediments to legislative expansions of IP rights are (mostly) purely political, not constitutional. In such cases, Lord Atkin’s “watertight compartments” (p. 10) are of no assistance. Nonetheless, his insistence that the existence of an international treaty should not prevent us from insisting that the usual constraints, be they constitutional or political, on government power ought always to be be upheld. Foreign governments should not be able to play the lenient parent if domestic courts, or voters, are inclined to be strict.

Arguing with Death, Again

I wrote, three months ago now, about the sorts of arguments people make for and against the death penalty. Contrary perhaps to our intuitions, from at least the times of Thucydides, death penalty’s opponents have tended to resort to consequentialist arguments, while its supporters have relied on appeals to justice. A couple of interviews the BBC has taken in California, where the abolition of death penalty is going to be the subject of a referendum in the fall, confirm this trend – mostly.

The mother of a murdered child, who supports the death penalty, talks about justice for the killer. “He deserves” to be put to death; he ought to pay for the victim’s suffering. The former warden of a prison who once oversaw executions and now opposes the death penalty talks about its expense and ineffectiveness.

Things are more complicated though. The mother (perhaps prompted by the interviewer, whom we don’t hear) speaks of lethal injection being “humane,” the “most humane” thing that can be done to the murderer. Never mind whether this is really so. What I want to emphasize is that, despite appealing to justice in the shape of retribution, she is not calling for him to be tortured and brutalized as he tortured and brutalized her son. The ex-warden, for her part, brings up the irrevocable injustice of innocents possibly being executed.

And then there is, on both sides, an argument that I hesitate classify as being either about justice or about consequences – the one about “closure.” The mother says she needs the death penalty inflicted on her son’s killer to have it; the ex-warden says that’s a “false hope.”

So the issue is complex. Still, a point a made in my original post might be true. Arguments made for the sales pitch to the electorate might (need to be) different from those that avail in philosophical disputations or even in a personal reflection on a fraught moral issue. (This might, incidentally, be a partial response to the worry, expressed for example by Jeremy Waldron, that judicial resolution of moral issues like the death penalty takes them from the realm of serious thinking into that of legal technicalities. It seems that the political process isn’t much better than the judicial one, since also transforms the way these issues are considered, albeit in a different way.)

Constitutional Implications

I have come across a fairly interesting new article, “A Comparative Analysis of the Doctrinal Consequences of Interpretive Disagreements for Implied Constitutional Rights,” by Zoë Robinson, of DePaul University’s College of Law. On the basis of a comparison between Australia and the United States, specifically between the development of a right to free political communication in Australia and the right to abortion in the U.S., Prof. Robinson argues that judicial implication is a rather ineffective way of protecting rights. Implication of rights is always the result of dubious interpretive methods; it is vulnerable to criticism, which makes judges self-conscious; it also results in “a paucity of interpretive resources which could support doctrinal developments” (96). I think prof. Robinson is right, as an empirical matter, about the weakness of implied rights, but I doubt that her explanations for it are sufficient, or even correct.

To help us think about the problem of implied rights, it is useful to cast a wider net than prof. Robinson does. One way of doing this is to bring Canada into the comparison. We have, after all, our own “implied bill of rights,” consisting mostly of the freedom of (political) speech. Another, which reflecting on implication in Canadian constitutional law suggests, is to compare implied rights not to “express” rights, as prof. Robinson does, but to other implied constitutional rules, which in Canada we know as “underlying constitutional principles,” and which also exist in American law (the separation of powers jurisprudence is, for example, built on the implications of the three-branch structure of government created by Articles I, II, and III of the U.S. Constitution).

The story of Canadian “implied bill of rights” cases seems to suggest that prof. Robinson may well be right. Despite high-minded rhetoric and apparent promise, the idea of rights implicit in the preamble of, or the institutions created by, the Constitution Act, 1867, was never endorsed by a majority of the Supreme Court, and never served as the actual ratio decidendi of a case; it was always raised in obiter by, at most, a couple of judges at a time. While lauded by some academics, notably F.R. Scott, it was criticized by others, notably Bora Laskin. And in the late 1970s, the Supreme Court came to reject it, in Dupond v. City of Montreal, [1978] 2 S.C.R. 770, (though justice Laskin, ironically, dissented). Despite this rejection, and the subsequent coming into force of the Charter, the “implied bill of rights” is not quite dead and buried (Justice Lebel, for example, referred to it with approval in his concurring opinion in R. v. Demers, 2004 SCC 46, [2004] 2 S.C.R. 489), but there is not much life in it either.

Yet looking at underlying constitutional principles provides a useful contrast. You’d think that they would be affected by the same problems as implied rights – dubious origins, vulnerability to criticism, impossibility to develop into something jurisprudentially useful. And to some extent they certainly are. They have indeed been criticized – for example, in a scathing paper by Université de Montréal’s Jean Leclair – and the Supreme Court’s unanimous, and dismissive, almost contemptuous, rejection of underlying principles as source of implied constitutional protections in British Columbia v. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd., 2005 SCC 49, [2005] 2 S.C.R. 473, seems to confirm that implication is not a reliable source of rights. But that’s not the whole story of underlying principles. They have been applied to powerful effect in judicial independence cases (indeed, it is certainly arguable that the Supreme Court has gone too far with the principle of judicial independence), and also in the Manitoba Language Rights reference, [1985] 1 S.C.R. 721, in which the Supreme Court managed to declare unconstitutional Manitoba’s entire statute book unconstitutional for not being enacted in both official languages without creating chaos, by the device of suspending the declaration of invalidity, in the name of the underlying principle of the Rule of Law.

What the cases involving underlying principles seem to suggest is that these principles are more easily used to work out fundamentals of constitutional structure than individual rights. The situation in America, at least as I understand it, confirms this thought, since separation of powers cases there seem to excite nowhere near the same degree of hostility, and to be subject to nowhere near the same degree of judicial self-doubt, as cases that can be described as involving implied rights. Why this should be so, I do not quite understand. Perhaps it is merely because rights cases are more high-profile and (or because) more intelligible to the layperson than structural cases. Perhaps there are other reasons why courts are more confident in their ability to get constitutional structure right than individual rights. However that may be, implied constitutional rules are not bound to be anemic and fruitless. If implied constitutional rights are, there ought to be some further explanation, specific to rights themselves, and not applicable to all constitutional implications.

Ideology in Constitutional Scholarship

Is most writing about constitutional law and theory (in the United States, but perhaps also in Canada) “intellectually corrupt”? In a post on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Jason Brennan, a philosopher and economist from Georgetown, says that it is. But, while his description of constitutional scholarship is, unfortunately, right, his explanation and evaluation of the problem seem too simplistic to me.

The problem with constitutional scholarship, says prof. Brennan, is

that almost everybody does the following:

1. Start with a political philosophy–a view of what you want the government to be able to do and what you want to the government to to be forbidden from doing.

2. Take the Constitution as a given.

3. Reverse engineer a theory of constitutional interpretation such that it turns out–happily!–that the Constitution forbids what you want it to forbid and allows what you want it to allow.

Academic arguments to the effect that something desirable is, unfortunately, unconstitutional, or that something undesirable is, alas, constitutional, are too few and too far between. Scholarship becomes indistinguishable from legal or political argument (these two being the same thing). “But,” says prof. Brennan, “academic legal theory is supposed to aim at truth. Legal theorists are not–or should not be–fighting political battles.”

If a scholar in another field – say in the interpretation of philosophical texts – acted like constitutional scholars act in the interpretation of legal text, we would think them “intellectually corrupt.” So why is it ok for constitutionalists to behave this way? Prof. Brennan claims that

[t]he only real defense of this practice I’ve seen is one that starts by arguing that the law is supposed to be normative and authoritative. However … –the case for legal positivism seems so strong that … this [does not seem] plausible.

In his own view, which he labels as “legal positivist and legal realist,” “laws [are]sociological phenomena, and whether a law is good or just is a contingent fact.” The constitution means what it means, not what whoever is reading it would like it to mean.

Prof. Brennan’s description of constitutional scholars as fighting political battles certainly rings a bell. His post was written in the context of the litigation surrounding president Obama’s healthcare reform, and academic commentary on it was, indeed, largely marked by the commentators’ ideology. But this phenomenon is very widespread. Indeed, what I have seen and heard at NYU suggests that some academics, at least, though don’t know how many, are open about regarding ideological acceptability as a criterion for assessing the value of a theory.

But is constitutional theory tainted by ideology because legal academics are intellectually corrupt, or because they are completely misguided about legal philosophy and fail to recognize the overwhelming arguments in favour of legal positivism, as prof. Brennan suggests? I think that things are much more complicated.

The problem with his explanation is that it assumes that there is a truth of the matter about constitutional interpretation, which a constitutional theory should uncover. But there is no objective truth about what a constitution means. To be sure, some constitutional provisions are clear enough, and one would be hard-pressed to find ideological interpreters disagreeing about their meaning. Many in the United States, especially on the political left, think that the equality of states’ representation in the Senate is morally indefensible, but no left-wing academic will say that the constitution doesn’t require it. But much of the constitution is not clear. Nor is it obvious how the meaning the less clear provisions is to be ascertained. It is possible, I think, to exclude some constitutional interpretations, even of less clear provisions, as quite obviously wrong. Whatever the prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” means, it surely makes the imposition of torture as a punishment unconstitutional. But what about death penalty? Different people can have different, reasonable, answers to that question, and they can – indeed they must – argue about which of these reasonable answers is better.

Law, in Jeremy Waldron’s words, is an “argumentative practice.” We argue about what this or that legal rule means – and that is an inextricable part of what law is, not a sad accident. This is especially true of constitutional law, for a number of reasons. One is simply that the stakes it involves are very high. What the state can and cannot do matters, sometimes at the level of policy, sometimes at the level of morality if not in the day-to-day lives of most people, and sometimes both. Another reason for the special importance of disagreement and argument to constitutional law is that constitutional texts are more vague than most legal sources. This is partly due to the need to secure agreement, often a super-majority agreement, on a text despite disagreements over specific rights, and to make that agreement last for decades and even centuries. This is also partly due to the fact that, contrary to what prof. Brennan seems to think obvious, much law – and certainly constitutional law – presents itself as morally good, and quite deliberately speaks in morally loaded terms. The third, related, reason why argument is so important in constitutional law is that it must somehow reconcile an arguably even greater number of competing values than other areas of the law. Democracy, federalism, Rule of Law, separation of powers, and protection of individual rights pull it in different directions. A constitutional text is, at most, a partial arbitrament between these (and other) competing values; it reflects them all, to some extent, and interpretations favouring one or another are bound to be plausible.

And here is where political ideology, which helps order these values, comes in. Constitutional theory, like any legal theory, is different from scientific theory, because it is in some measure argument. And argument about constitutional theory involves values, and hence ideology. It is fair, I think, to call it intellectually corrupt if it is limited to values and ideology and ignores legal sources. Any scholarship that deserves the name must be in touch with the reality it describes, explains, or critiques, so constitutional theory must, so far as possible, be grounded in constitutional text and precedent. But that will not make it free of ideology.

That said, it should still be possible for a scholar to acknowledge that his or her preferred constitutional interpretation is, if not incorrect by some (nonexistent) purely objective standard, unlikely to be adopted by courts (or other constitutional actors). One should strive to be clear-eyed about such things, and admittedly, legal academics often are not. To that extent, their scholarship suffers from a serious weakness.

Small is Beautiful

How many judges should a country’s highest court have? Those of Canada and the United States both have nine, but Jonathan Turley, of George Washington University, argues in an op-ed in the Washington Post that that’s not nearly enough. Although made with the U.S. context in mind, his argument, if persuasive, would be relevant to Canada since our supreme courts happen to be of the same size. But it is not persuasive, and instead, it illustrates the dangers of what might be called casual comparativism – the use of half-baked, half-ignorant comparisons between legal systems, which are more often than not misleading, and can be used to reach and justify unwarranted conclusions.

Prof. Turley is concerned that the Supreme Court of the United States often decides cases of the greatest importance by 5-4 votes. The problem with this is that the “court is so small that the views of individual justices have a distorting and idiosyncratic effect on our laws.” A nine-member court is bound to endure bitter splits into two camps, with one or two swing voters in the middle.

This is something that countries with larger high courts manage to avoid: Germany (16 members), Japan (15), United Kingdom (12) and Israel (15). France uses 124 judges and deputy judges, while Spain has 74. These systems have structural differences, but they eliminate the concentration-of-power problem that we have in the United States.

The current number of the Supreme Court’s members is, he points out, an historical accident and, he adds, “one of the worst numbers you could pick.” He thinks a 19-member court, similar in size to circuit courts in the United States, would be much better. Such courts

are often divided … [y]et, it is rare that one or two of those judges consistently provide the swing votes on all issues when they sit “en banc,” or as a whole. Appellate courts of this size have proved to be manageable while allowing for more diversity in their members. More important, the power of individual judges is diluted.

Prof. Turley expects other benefits from an expansion of the Supreme Court’s membership, including the possibility to have its judges ride circuit again, as they did until the Civil War in the United States, and serve as temporary additions to intermediate appellate courts, breathing in the real air of legal practice, to supplement the rarefied atmosphere (to borrow an expression from Lord Denning) of the highest court.

As I said above, I do not find this a compelling argument.

There are no guarantees of a larger court not being split of course, perhaps quite evenly, just as there is nothing in the number nine that condemns a nine-member court to a permanent 5-4 split. Indeed, even the U.S. Supreme Court decides many cases unanimously, and others by large majorities. And as the Supreme Court of Canada’s statistical report on its work from 2001 to 2011 shows, its decisions are, more often than not (in around 75% of the cases), unanimous despite its having nine members. Indeed I wonder if a larger court would not be susceptible to more complex, three- or four-way splits, which are a bigger problem for the certainty and clarity of the law than a clear-cut 5-4 (though in 1990s, the Supreme Court of Canada was much more fractured than now – despite having only nine members).

As for the reference to “countries with larger high courts,” it is quite misleading. It ignores obvious comparison points – Canada and Australia – whose judicial systems are most like that of the United States, and whose supreme courts have nine and seven members respectively. It refers to the very large French Cour de cassation, but ignores the Conseil constitutionnel, which has nine appointed members (in addition to former presidents, who are entitled to sit there as well). It refers to the total membership of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, but ignores the fact that it sits in smaller panels, typically of five judges. The same is true of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, which typically sits in panels of three or eight. (Now in fairness, it is not entirely clear whether prof. Turley proposes that his 19-member Supreme Court to sit in full or in smaller panels – but smaller panels would arguably cancel out the reduction in the power of individual judges which he advocates.) So the examples invoked seem to disprove, rather than to support, his claims.

As the comparison with the Supreme Court of Canada suggests, to the extent that the Supreme Court of the United States is “dysfunctional” as prof. Turley believes (which I doubt), the solution to the problem must be in changing the legal and political culture in which it is embedded. This is perhaps even more difficult than changing the number of judges, but will be more effective. As for Canada, our nine-member court seems to serve us just fine.

La primauté de la législation

La semaine dernière, la Cour supérieure du Québec a rejeté la demande visant, entre autres, à faire déclarer inconstitutionnelle la “Loi 204”, qui exempte rétroactivement l’entente sur la gestion du futur amphithéâtre de Québec, conclue entre la ville de Québec et Qubecor, de l’exigence d’un appel d’offre (dans la mesure où cette exigence s’y appliquait, ce que la ville a toujours nié), dans De Belleval c. Québec (Ville de), 2012 QCCS 2668. Les demandeurs avaient formulé une multitude d’arguments constitutionnels à l’encontre de la loi. Ils soutenaient qu’elle violait la primauté du droit, notamment en raison de son caractère rétroactif, ainsi que la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés et la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne (québécoise), en enfreignant leurs droits à la liberté de conscience et à la liberté d’expression, à la sécurité, à un procès équitable, et aussi en étant vague et excessive. Une si longue liste de prétentions est généralement un mauvais signe – un signe de désespoir sinon d’incompétence de l’avocat – et elle l’a été en l’espèce. Le juge Jacques n’a pas été persuadé.

L’argument le plus étoffé des demandeurs portait sur la rétroactivité de la Loi 204. La plupart des philosophes du droit qui se sont penchés sur la primauté du droit considère la non-rétroactivité du droit comme un élément essentiel de ce principe. Le droit est censé guider l’action de ses sujets. Or, une loi rétroactive, qui applique certaines conséquences à des actions déjà commises, ne saurait le faire. De plus, comme l’a fait remarquer notamment Lon Fuller, elle remet en cause l’intégrité des autres lois en vigueur, laissant entendre qu’elles sont susceptibles d’amendement rétroactif. Même une loi rétroactive qui accorde des bénéfices ou écarte les sanctions (plutôt que d’en imposer), comme la Loi 204, peut être problématique à bien des égards, comme le soutient Jeremy Waldron dans un article intitulé “Retroactive Law: How Dodgy Was Duynhoven“. La rétroactivité est une des critiques les plus communes de la common law ou du droit prétorien en général, par exemple dans la célèbre formulation de Jeremy Bentham, qui comparait la common law à la “loi” qu’un homme donne à son chien en le battant pour une transgression quelconque (dont le chien n’avait évidemment pas idée qu’il s’agissait d’une transgression), et les défenseurs de la common law, tels que Ronald Dworkin et F.A. Hayek, font beaucoup d’efforts pour repousser cette attaque.

Cependant, la jurisprudence canadienne est claire. Outre la garantie de la non-imposition de sanctions criminelles rétroactives à l’alinéa 11(g) de la Charte canadienne, rien n’empêche les législatures canadienne de légiférer de façon rétroactive. C’est l’enseignement, par exemple, de l’arrêt de la Cour suprême Colombie‑Britannique c. Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltée, 2005 CSC 49, [2005] 2 R.C.S. 473, où la Cour à jugé constitutionnelle une loi créant rétroactivement un recours permettant au gouvernement de recouvrer les dépenses causées par le tabagisme. Le juge Jacques rejette donc l’argument fondé sur la rétroactivité – avec raison, eu égard à la jurisprudence qui le liait (et qu’il ne manifeste, du reste, aucune envie de remettre en question).

Cette jurisprudence, à mon avis, est un désastre. Le grand A.V. Dicey qui, à la fin du 19e siècle, faisait l’éloge à la fois de la “souveraineté du Parlement” et de la primauté du droit (qu’il a été le premier à étudier de façon systématique), s’en serait félicité. (Ce n’est pas une coïncidence que Dicey était plutôt favorable aux “indemnity acts” – des lois rétroactives écartant des sanctions que le droit normalement en vigueur attache à certains actes, similaires la Loi 204.) Cependant, les opinions académiques sur la primauté du droit ont bien changé depuis un siècle. Or, les tribunaux canadiens ont toujours une compréhension très étroite de la primauté du droit, la limitant à l’exigence de l’existence de règles de droit et d’une autorisation juridique pour toute action gouvernementale, mais excluant – sauf garantie constitutionnelle explicite – tout autre exigence de forme, de procédure ou de fond que la primauté droit, telle que comprise par les philosophes du droit, impose aux législatures (et que le professeur Waldron revoit, par exemple, ici).

Les autres arguments des demandeurs sont rejetés encore plus facilement. La Loi 204 ne limite pas leur liberté de conscience ou d’expression, puisqu’elle ne les empêche pas de s’exprimer. Elle ne menace en rien leur sécurité. Elle ne les prive pas de leur droit d’ester en justice, même si elle change le droit applicable au litige qu’ils ont amorcé. Elle n’est ni vague ni excessive. Il est difficile de voir sur quoi étaient fondées ces prétentions, et il n’est pas surprenant qu’elles soient rejetées.

Le problème de la Loi 204, sur le plans des principes juridiques, c’est bien sa rétroactivité, et aussi son manque criant de généralité, une autre exigence classique de la primauté du droit que les tribunaux canadiens ne reconnaissent pas. On pourrait dire qu’au lieu de la primauté du droit, la jurisprudence canadienne, très réticente à censurer les législatures, donne effet à la primauté de la législation.

Rights and Disagreement

Charles Krauthammer has an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post discussing President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, and accusing him of taking an intellectually incoherent approach to this matter. Mr. Obama has said that marriage – including of the same-sex variety – is a right; he has also said that the issue of allowing same-sex marriage (or not) should be for each state to decide. Mr. Krauthammer charges that this is contradictory: rights are rights are rights, and if something is a right, then it’s a right everywhere, and not state by state. It is the same argument that Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West made in an op-ed on Slate (which I criticized here on other grounds). Mr. Krauthammer’s colleague Ruth Marcus also raised this issue a few days ago. It seems like a compelling argument, but it is wrong.

It is fine to say, in the abstract, that if something is a right it is a right everywhere and is not negotiable. (Actually, that too is a very controversial position, but let’s assume it.) The problem, as Jeremy Waldron likes to remind us, is that we don’t have any agreed upon means of verifying, to the satisfaction of everyone, the claim that something is a right, the way we have agreed upon ways of verifying the veracity of a claim made by a scientific theory. Thus even assuming that there exists a truth of the matter regarding rights, we can never be sure that we are, at any given moment, in possession of the truth about a claim of right. We think, of course, that our opinions about rights are correct; but if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot trivialize the possibility that we are mistaken.

We must recognize, therefore, that disagreements about right are can be reasonable. And that means recognizing – a possibility for which Mr. Krauthammer does not allow – that someone who does not share our views about a certain claim of rights is not, for that reason, a bigot. I suspect that, if we think of the international realm, we mostly share that view. We do not think that every country that does not share our views about rights is bigoted. We might think them wrong, but not immoral. And we do not think that we ought to impose our views on them. We recognize that these are matters over which good faith disagreement is possible, and it is not wrong for each polity to resolve this disagreement as it thinks best – because it just might that they, rather than us, will get at the right answer.

Mr. Obama’s position might simply the application of this line of thinking inside the United States. He thinks that same-sex marriage is a right. But he acknowledges the possibility of good-faith disagreement on the matter (after all he, supposedly, until recently had doubts ), and thinks that this disagreement is best resolved in each state separately. This is not contradictory or incoherent.

There might be one more problem with that position. Where rights are codified in an authoritative document, like the U.S. Constitution, it seems strange to accept that it might mean different things to different people. But we know it does; people disagree about what the Constitution means just like they disagree about the underlying issues of rights. Unless one accepts the Dworkinian “one right answer” view, it need not be particularly troubling that the same document is interpreted differently by different people.

For once, left, right, and centre are united at criticizing Mr. Obama. And the irony is that this criticism is quite unfair.