4 Quotes Tagged: judiciary

It was actually Thomas Jefferson himself who said 'we might as well ask a man to wear the coat that fitted him when he was a boy' as expect future generations to live under what he called 'the regime of their barbarous ancestors.' So even the founders that these kind of dead-hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants — today's judicial so-called conservatives — the importance of keeping with the times. And we deserve judges and justices who understand that.

If logic and reason, the hard, cold products of the mind, can be relied upon to deliver justice or produce the truth, how is it that these brain-heavy judges rarely agree? Five-to-four decisions are the rule, not the exception. Nearly half of the court must be unjust and wrong nearly half of the time. Each decision, whether the majority or minority, exudes logic and reason like the obfuscating ink from a jellyfish, and in language as opaque. The minority could have as easily become the decision of the court. At once we realize that logic, no matter how pretty and neat, that reason, no matter how seemingly profound and deep, does not necessarily produce truth, much less justice. Logic and reason often become but tools used by those in power to deliver their load of injustice to the people. And ultimate truth, if, indeed, it exists, is rarely recognizable in the endless rows of long words that crowd page after page of most judicial regurgitations.

The President and the Congress are all very well in their way. They can say what they think they think, but it rests with the Supreme Court to decide what they have really thought.

No man ought certainly to be a judge in his own cause, or in any cause in respect to which he has the least interest or bias.