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September 13, 2005
Judging by Machine
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Edward Lazarus, a lawyer in private practice, is author of "Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court." |
At the risk of belaboring the "umpire" metaphor, like Professor Shugerman, I'm a big fan of John Hart Ely's process-based justification for the activism of the Warren era, but I seriously doubt that Ely would agree that figuring out when courts need to aggressively protect the channels of democracy is much like figuring out whether a pitch has nicked the outside corner of the plate. One requires extrapolation and judgment about the purposes of the Constitution; the other could be done by a machine.
Posted at September 13, 2005 09:52 AM