Impartial Justice(s)

 

This photograph implies that I am going to write about crooked judges. According to some statistics I didn't fact-check, there are many crooked judges (in the sense of, "on the take"). Sooo many crooked judges. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't care about crooked judges, much, because, well, who knows - maybe you can pay them to do the right thing. I'm concerned about a whole different kind of judge, and one that is far worse - the judge who won't do the right thing regardless of any moral or intellectual obligation to do so. Partisan Judges are not for sale - they're on a crusade, and you're either a Believer or you're screwed. Constitutions and laws are no longer their guiding principle. The law is what they say it is, and what many of them say is most likely to benefit a small group of people from largely empty rural states who have nothing to do at night but sit around the campfire and dream up whacky conspiracy theories. People frightened by balloons.

I digress. Political partisanship has become rampant in the American Judiciary for reasons that - once again - I don't have room or inclination to discuss here. Neither am I going to recount the dozens of instances when Supreme Court rulings, of late, have been "along party lines." You all know what I'm talking about. Closer to home, the Democratic-leaning (4-3) North Carolina Supreme Court (SCONC, which is how locals pronounce "skunk") recently - a couple of months ago - decreed that the electoral maps for the state senate created by our MAGA-lite legislature were an illegal partisan gerrymander. Two months later and with a Republican majority now in charge at SCONC (5-2), you can guess what's going to happen.

Some of you wits now will point out that the decision two months ago was also a partisan decision, and since that tends to support my point, I am happy to concede. (Note, however, that those Justices didn't take issue with the House districts.) The thing is, all these people take the same judicial oath - from SCOTUS to the lowliest magistrate - promising some stuff about the rich and poor that no one ever really believed, and to be "impartial," which heretofore was THE thing judges were supposed to be. "Sure," you say. "That never happened either." Except it has - a lot. Best example?  Earl Warren, a Republican, was appointed by Dwight Eisenhower in full expectation that Warren would get the liberal justices on the court to toe the line. Instead, and with surprising skill, Warren led what was probably the most liberal court in US history, on everything from segregation to voting rights to right to privacy to criminal law. It is the history of the Warren Court, and a little-understood principle of stare decisis that the current court is trying (quite successfully) to bulldoze into rubble.

I don't know where this leaves me, as a lawyer. We become lawyers because - all evidence to the contrary - we believe in the rule of law. Maybe in your corner of the world (or the legal profession) this shit doesn't effect you. Eventually it will. The whole practice is or will be defined by judge-shopping, looking for the court that most suits the political needs of your client: a liberal judge for your criminal, a conservative judge for your corporation. We're not supposed to judge-shop, but we are supposed to "zealously defend" the interests of our clients. And that's a quandary, when you toss judicial impartiality out the door.