"What should a judge do when he must hand down a ruling based on a law that he considers unjust or oppressive? This question is examined through a series of problems concerning unjust law that arose with respect to slavery in nineteenth-century America"". --Amazon
In: Political science quarterly: a nonpartisan journal devoted to the study and analysis of government, politics and international affairs ; PSQ, Band 101, Heft 2, S. 277-288
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Charles L. Barzun (University of Virginia School of Law) & John C. P. Goldberg (Harvard Law School) have posted Introduction: The Nature of the Judicial Process at 100 (Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities) on SSRN. Here is the...
A generation ago "legal realists" led by Jerome Frank and Karl Llewellyn dismissed law as a myth—a function of what judges had for breakfast. The important thing, they insisted, was what a court did, not what it said. No doubt this was good medicine for the times. Yet, however broad Frank's 1930 language, later on the bench he loyally acknowledged the compulsive force of legal rules. As a lower court judge, he decided cases in accordance with what he found the law to be—and on occasion he made clear in addenda what he thought it ought to be.Llewellyn, too, changed his mind. In 1934 he had said, "The theory that rules decide cases seems for a century to have fooled, not only library-ridden recluses, but judges." Seventeen years later he confessed that his earlier behavioral descriptions of law contained "unhappy words when not more fully developed, and they are plainly at best a very partial statement of the whole truth."In short, after their initial enthusiasm, these and other legal realists recognized that there is and must be law in the judicial process, as well as discretion. This was inevitable, for society can no more dispense with order and coherence than it can deny the demands of changing circumstance. We must have stability, yet we cannot stand still; and so the legal system inevitably has both static and dynamic qualities. Holmes put it in a thimble: "The … law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow."
Abstract This paper proposes a synthesis that renders democratic principles compatible with the preservation of judicial control of constitutionality. This has been mediated by what I have called 'weak procedural constitutionalism', a methodology through which constitutional conflicts are debated in the legislature and among the citizenry as the real holders of the final say in society, with judicial activity focused on an intermediate say and the promotion of subsequent social deliberation. The judicial process thus becomes a public dialogical procedure susceptible to intervention by citizens and capable of generating public information processes facilitating accountability. The constant quest for instrumentalities that increase the democratic legitimacy of constitutional courts is an existential necessity. Only through real opportunities for dialogue and citizen participation in the decision-making process can judicial review be made democratically palatable. This requires that both judges and legislators play an intermediate rather than primary role, one in which democratically elected legislatures enjoy a high degree of legitimacy in adopting decisions, in juxtaposition with the derivative legitimacy appurtenant to constitutional courts. The premise for the exercise of what I denominate as weak constitutionality control, or the hypothesis for a weak procedural constitutionalism, is a possible synthesis of the tension between constitutionalism and democracy, with emphasis on the Colombian case.