Gableman Prognostication

Yesterday a three judge panel heard oral arguments on the disciplinary complaint against Justice Michael Gablemen. You can review the offending ad here and my recent discussion of it on Prawfsblawg there.

There are two rules that are pertinent. The first sentence of 60.06(3)(c) provides “[a] candidate for a judicial office shall not knowingly or with reckless disregard for the statement’s truth or falsity misrepresent the identity, qualifications, present position, or other fact concerning the candidate or an opponent.” This is the proscription that the Judicial Commission says was violated by the Mitchell ad.

But there is a second sentence. It states that “[a] candidate for judicial office should not knowingly make representations that, although true, are misleading, or knowingly make statements that are likely to confuse the public with respect to the proper role of judges and lawyers in the American adversary system.”

The difference between “shall” and “should” is significant. The preamble to the Judicial Code states that “[t]he use of “should” or “should not” in the rules is intended to encourage or discourage specific conduct and as a statement of what is or is not appropriate conduct but not as a binding rule under which a judge may be disciplined.” (emphasis supplied)

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I Am the Author

walrusYour faithful blog committee moderates posts and comments on  a rotating basis.  I was  “on call” on Tuesday evening and, returning home in despair after a night at Miller Park,  inadvertently published posts by Professors Greipp and Papke under my own name. The mistake was fixed in the morning.

But I found the latter error intriguing. Here I was, ostensibly the “author” of a post regretting “dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.” It was as if someone had replaced my bedside Edmund Burke with Jean-Paul Sartre.

But here’s the thing. I do agree – in a sense – with David’s point.

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My Initial — But Belated — Reaction to Caritas in Veritate

I have been meaning to comment on Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate, published on July 7 of this year. I don’t have time to do it — to begin to do it — justice right now, but there are two points worth making.

There is always a need for caution in the treatment of papal encyclicals. They are written to hold up values, more than solutions and are often written at a level of generality that leaves much unresolved. As John Paul II wrote, “the Church proposes; she imposes nothing.” The second is that — although we can’t help but read them with American eyes — they are not written only for us.

Still, I think an American reader should be struck by two insights — neither particularly new — “proposed” by Caritas.

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