Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Catholic judges

If you want to read interesting thoughts offered by smart people about Catholic judges, there is at the moment no better venue to visit than Mirror of Justice, a group blog "dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory." Among the nuggets currently posted are a snippet from an old Stephen L. Carter article on "The Religiously Devout Judge":

"The ideal of the objective judge was slain by the legal realists long before the critical legal studies movement resurrected it in order to kill it again. But the ghost of the objective judge refuses to go away. I doubt that the objective judge will die quietly, as long as liberals continue to think that letting a judge rest her decisions on a moral understanding is a good idea. Because once a judge’s moral understanding is permitted to play a role, the liberal argument cannot distinguish religiously based knowledge from other moral knowledge, or at least, cannot do so without arguments that require a bit too much cognitive dissonance. The aspirational model of the objective judge might offer the only path to sanity. And if we continue to pursue distinctions as crazy as this one, a path to sanity will be a useful thing to have."

And then there’s
this link to an old First Things piece by Michael McConnell on the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances Act and a judge’s refusal to punish violators of it.

Bookmark the site to leaven your reading of the intelligent, provocative, and eminently practical Bench Memos.

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