Draft of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com)Is Robert Mueller an Officer of the United States?
Department of Justice Headquarters, Washington, D.C. (Orhan Cam/Shutterstock.com).Juries Judge the Law As Well
Defining Liberty Properly
On the Originalism blog, Michael Ramsey and Andrew Hyman responded to my post for Law and Liberty on the original understanding of substantive due process. Hyman disputes the definition of “liberty” I provided and asserts a different definition of “due process of law” in the Fifth Amendment, while Ramsey asks for more evidence that the definition of “liberty” given wasn’t unique to Thomas Jefferson.
The Original Understanding of Substantive Due Process
The modern conservative legal movement grew up in response to the Warren Court’s activism in the 1960s. In opposing the decisions of Justice Brennan and the rest, conservatives made use of the same arguments that liberals had used during the New Deal, when the Supreme Court had a conservative majority resistant to the Roosevelt program. In essence, the conservatives during the Warren years called liberals hypocrites for not deferring to the legislature, since deference was the claimed reason for the 1937 overturning of Lochner v. New York (1905). When the conservatives finally did get a majority on the Court in the 1980s, it was under a Republican president, and deference to the Reagan administration made a lot of sense for conservatives.
Engagement Doesn’t Mean Limitless Power
In a recent post on Law and Liberty, Mark Pulliam lambasted the idea of a more “rigorous standard of judicial review, across the board, when laws are challenged” called “judicial engagement.” He claims that those of us who advocate judicial engagement presume that judges are untainted by bias or personal predilections whereas they “are just government officials who wear robes, no different (and certainly no more noble or wise) than any other functionary of the state.”
Judicial engagement does not make any such presumption. Judges are no different from any other people. But the office of a judge is different. A judge has different incentives than a legislator because of the nature of his or her office, which renders him or her less vulnerable to manipulation by interest groups or political pressure.
