What a Judge does

Posted: April 7, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Ann Althouse cuts to the chase on how being a judge is supposed to work:

Scalia is resisting telling us about his personal views because they are irrelevant to the work of a judge, and he’s modeling upstanding judicial behavior, saying what the law is and nothing more.

The second quote is even better than the first:

You may think it’s cruel of Scalia to deprive us of soothing words, but don’t be tricked about why he writes like that. Scalia is adhering to the most basic legal proposition that judges must decide cases according to the law and leave the rest to the processes of democracy

In a democracy it is the people representatives who are supposed to make the law. Ann gets it. I think a debate on the subject between her and Darren Hutchinson would fill a hall and expand the mind.

Comments
  1. Saqib Ali says:
    April 7, 2009 at 4:56 pm

    In recent interview with Hoover Institution, elaborating on his earlier statement that “devotees of The Living Constitution do not seek to facilitate social change but to prevent it” (Scalia & Gutmann, 1998), Justice Scalia said:

    “To make things change you don’t need a constitution. The function of a Constitution is to rigidify, to ossify, NOT to facilitate change. You want change? All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. Things will change as fast as you like. My Constitution, very flexible changing. You want right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens that it is a good idea, and pass a law. And then you find out, the results are worst than we ever thought, you can repeal the law. That’s flexibility. The reason people want the Supreme Court to declare that abortion is a constitutional right is precisely to rigidify that right, it means it sweeps across all fifty states and it is a law now and forever or until the Supreme Court changes its mind. That’s not flexibility.”

    “By trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs doing from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all.”

    (Scalia & Gutmann, 1998)

    Source(s):
    Scalia, A., & Gutmann, A. (1998). A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. Princeton University Press.