judges
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What Will They Be Thinking?
Jack Balkin has an interesting post on Balkinization, discussing what he calls “arguments from the future” in constitutional law―arguments to the effect that a constitutional issue has to be resolved a certain way because of what people will think about it at some point in the future, say in 20 years. “If,” he writes, like Martin… Continue reading
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Independence Be With You
The application of the principle of judicial independence, as the Supreme Court has developed it, to ordinary judges of provincial, federal, and superior courts is clear enough. But the extension of its protections to other judicial officials, such as deputy judges, masters, or prothonotaries still causes friction between the judiciary and the “political branches.” A… Continue reading
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In Cautious Praise of Rhetoric
Rhetoric―the art of packaging one’s arguments so as to make them more attractive―has a bad name. It is associated with deceit at worst, and meaninglessness at best. It is seen as a distraction. Why should we care about the way arguments are packaged―surely what really matters is their substance? A student put something like this… Continue reading
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The Wrongs of Rights?
The New York Review of Books has an interesting piece by David Cole on Michael J. Klarman’s From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage. The thesis of the book (which I haven’t read, so I’m relying on prof. Cole’s summary) is that litigation in pursuit of the recognition… Continue reading
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The Faint of Heart
Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States famously admits to being a “fainthearted” originalist, who would hold that the punishment of flogging is “cruel and unusual” and thus prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even though, at the time of its ratification, the Amendment was not generally understood to… Continue reading
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Le langage de la justice
Un article paru sur le site de Radio-Canada parle d’une étude réalisée par un avocat, Mark Power, de Heenan Blaikie, pour le compte de la Fédération des associations des juristes d’expression française de common law, portant sur la constitutionnalité de nominations de juges unilingues à la Cour suprême. Selon Me Power (ou du moins selon… Continue reading
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Judicial Independence, Freedom, and Duty
Judicial independence is a familiar idea, though it is also a difficult one, in more than one sense. Difficult to accept, on the one hand, because independence from political, and ultimately electoral, control seats uneasily with our notions of democracy in which political power (which judges exercise, since they make their decisions in the name… Continue reading
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Almost Arbitrary
On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Eugene Volokh has a post about an interesting case just decided by a federal district court in California. The case, Hebrew University of Jerusalem v. General Motors LLC, concerns GM’s right to use the image of Albert Einstein if an advertisement for one of its gas-guzzlers. Einstein died in 1955… Continue reading
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Right Answer Romantics
I was re-reading F.A. Hayek’s discussion of the common law in Chapters 4 and 5 of Rules and Order, the first volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty, and was struck by something I had missed when I first read it four years ago while working on a thesis on common-law constitutionalism. When deciding a case… Continue reading
Double Aspect 