Lessons in Constitutional Law

From the former head of the Harvard Law Review and sometimes professor of constitutional law (via CNN transcript):

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.  Well, this is a good example.  And I’m pretty confident that this – this court will recognize that and not take that step.

I don’t know what I find more interesting: (1) the belief that the Court overturning a law would be unprecedented; or (2) the attack on the justices as “an unelected group of people.”

Perhaps the next step will be the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 2013.

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Starving the Courts

In the latest issue, The Economist gives a startling look on the dire situation of courts in America. Budget cuts and, at the federal level, political obstruction have fostered delays and case backlogs. Some of the dire consequences:

• In California, uncontested divorces now take a year to obtain.
• One circuit court in Georgia has stopped civil adjudication (traffic offenses, etc.) altogether.
• Courts in 14 states are closed on some work days.
• One municipal court in Ohio stopped accepting new cases because it could not afford to buy paper.
• New York judges’ pay has been frozen for a dozen years, even as their caseload has increased by 30%.
• In Florida in 2009, according to the Washington Economics Group, the backlog in civil courts is costing the state some $9.8 billion in GDP a year.

And so on.

As a libertarian, I believe that the judicial function is a core function of government, and that government should fund it properly and do adjudication well. Judges should be highly paid and courthouses well staffed and efficiently run. Private arbitration is all well and good, but arbitration contracts ultimately depend on enforcement by the public courts. States should be increasing, not cutting, judicial budgets, even if they have to raise taxes or cut more severely other programs in order to do so.

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