Restrained Judicial Activism

In contemporary legal discussion, “judicial activism” is roundly condemned.  This behavior refers generally to any instance in which a court’s opinion is the product of the court following its personal policy preferences instead of the commands of the law.

The favored behavior is “judicial restraint,” which is usually defined by the values of “originalism” (deference to the original intent of the lawgivers), “textualism” (respect for the language of laws), “self-restraint” (respect for precedent) , and “separation of powers” (deference to the prerogatives of democratically elected legislative bodies and/or the States).

The foundations of “judicial restraint” are originalism and textualism.  “Self-restraint” and “separation of powers” are secondary values. Precedent and legislative enactments are binding and commendable only when they are consistent with the original intent and text of higher law, which is not always the case. 

The words of any law (statute or a decision) are the best evidence of its meaning because it is presumed that the law’s Framers picked those words to efficiently describe what they intended the law to require or prohibit.  (For the sake of convenience I use “Framers” to refer to courts rendering a decision or legislative bodies drafting a statute.)  “Textualism” demands respect for the clear meaning of these words.  Unless there is some unavoidable flaw or ambiguity in the drafting which makes the intent of the Framers incomplete, incoherent, or ambiguous, courts should treat laws as meaning what they say they mean.

Textualism has its limitations. 

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Why Judges Aren’t Legislators

I have not yet had a chance to blog on Judge Sarah Evans Barker’s intriguing Hallows lecture, but I have always been a bit uneasy about judges advocating abandonment of the traditional tools of the trade when they lead to a result that does not “make sense” or is “unworkable.” I don’t say that it can never be done (as Justice Scalia has said, “I, too, am a sinner”), but it is a principle with no readily defined stopping point.

So what, you may ask, does this have to do with Attorney General Van Hollen’s Advisory Memorandum stating that there is a constitutional right to openly carry firearms?  Well, there is a history.  In 1998, the voters amended the Wisconsin Constitution to create an very broad right to “keep and bear arms for security, defense, hunting, recreation or any other lawful purpose.”  This is, to put it mildly, in tension with Wisconsin’s extraordinarily broad prohibition of concealed carry.  There are virtually no exceptions, and there is no provision for the issuance of permits.

When first faced with this conflict, the Wisconsin Supreme Court observed that it was “anomalous.” One might have expected that the anomaly would have been eliminated by declaring the statute to be unconstitutional in its overbreadth and placing the onus on the legislature to draft a more carefully tailored law. But the court, apparently concerned about unlimited concealed carry, did not do so.

Rather, it decided to proceed on a case-by-case basis, deciding when the need for security was compelling enough to result in constitutional protection for concealed carry. Briefly (and at the risk of some oversimplification), you can conceal your weapon if you run a store in a high-crime area, but not if you transport money to the bank in a small town and not if you simply live and travel in a high crime area.

In so holding, the court emphasized the particular problems associated with concealment and noted that a gun owner has other options.

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Seeing the Error of Their Ways

Chad Oldfather has a new article on SSRN entitled “Error Correction.”  Having analyzed various other aspects of the appellate process in earlier articles, Chad here turns to the most mundane function of the appellate court.  Where most scholarship on appellate process focuses on the lawmaking authority of appellate courts, few cases actually result in appellate courts breaking important new legal ground; more commonly, appellate review is simply a search for error based on established precedents.  But what exactly is “error”?  The question has received little scholarly attention to date, but Chad now remedies that neglect in his characteristically thoughtful fashion.  Here is the abstract of his article, which is forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal: 

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