High Courts & Misdemeanors
Lochnerizing Courts & the Abolition of Marriage
by Robert P. George
Judges are not legislators. The legitimacy of their decisions, particularly those decisions that displace the judgments of the people’s elected representatives, depends entirely on the truth of the claim that the law authorizes the court to settle the matter. When this claim is false, a judicial edict is not redeemed by its good intentions and even its good consequences (if the consequences of the edict in fact turn out to be good).
Decisions in which the courts usurp the constitutionally granted authority of the people in a basically just democratic polity are not merely incorrect; . . .
