Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Death by 'Due Process
Lino Graglia gives a good description of how judicial activism works. Basicly, take a clause or two in the Constitution and use it as a lever to accomplish everything you want.
As George Will said regarding Roe v. Wade: the fact that a baby has more or less rights at certain points because the human gestation period is evenly divisible by the number 3 shows Roe v. Wade is not based on sound legal reasoning.
Lino Graglia gives a good description of how judicial activism works. Basicly, take a clause or two in the Constitution and use it as a lever to accomplish everything you want.
Judge-made constitutional law is the product of judicial review--the power of judges to disallow policy choices made by other officials of government, supposedly on the ground that they are prohibited by the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson warned that judges, always eager to expand their own jurisdiction, would "twist and shape" the Constitution "as an artist shapes a ball of wax." This is exactly what has happened.
The Constitution is a very short document, easily printed on a dozen pages. The Framers wisely meant to preclude very few policy choices that legislators, at least as committed to American principles of government as judges, would have occasion to make.
The essential irrelevance of the Constitution to contemporary constitutional law should be clear enough from the fact that the great majority of Supreme Court rulings of unconstitutionality involve state, not federal, law; and nearly all of them purport to be based on a single constitutional provision, the 14th Amendment--in fact, on only four words in one sentence of the Amendment, "due process" and "equal protection." The 14th Amendment has to a large extent become a second constitution, replacing the original.
It does not require jurisprudential sophistication to realize that the justices do not decide controversial issues of social policy by studying those four words. No question of interpretation is involved in any of the court's controversial constitutional rulings, because there is nothing to interpret. The states did not lose the power to regulate abortion in 1973 in Roe v. Wade because Justice Harry Blackmun discovered in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, the purported basis of the decision, something no one noticed before. The problem is that the Supreme Court justices have made the due process and equal protection clauses empty vessels into which they can pour any meaning. This converts the clauses into simple transferences of policy-making power from elected legislators to the justices, authorizing a court majority to remove any policy issue from the ordinary political process and assign it to themselves for decision. This fundamentally changes the system of government created by the Constitution.
As George Will said regarding Roe v. Wade: the fact that a baby has more or less rights at certain points because the human gestation period is evenly divisible by the number 3 shows Roe v. Wade is not based on sound legal reasoning.
