SCOTUS and the Language of Justice

American Thinker ^ | April 18, 2016 | Philip Ahlrich

[Kaslin]

The Supreme Court has only law to consider; therefore, it is not the prerogative of the court to decide on issues of moral justice. But its liberal jurists, who presumably have been informed of America's founding purpose, speak in an artificial language, freighting old words with new definitions that have sufficed to render morality a product of law. Can the term "vaccination," for instance, be expanded to mean "forced sterilization"? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it could, at a time when progressive elites were promoting eugenics as a proper science (Buck v. Bell, 1927), and seven of the remaining justices agreed with him.

The modern Court, guided as much by anomalous precedent as by settled law, enters a region of pragmatic relativism, knowing its decisions, while resolving certain legal issues, will bring whole categories of perplexity and harm to millions of good people, to their beliefs and ways of life and to the wide and common understanding of justice. How, then, are these jurists, selected by partisan privilege, comfortable with a system of justice so arbitrary and so divided by doctrinaire prejudices? What are they thinking as they watch the consequences of their decisions disturb and ripple through society along ideological lines of force? Does the Court in any way serve a didactic function if its understanding of justice sways in sympathy with the emergence of new currents of popular opinion?

[BuckeyeTexan]

FReepmail me to subscribe to or unsubscribe from the SCOTUS ping list.

[Intolerant in NJ]

...freighting old words with new definitions that have sufficed to render morality a product of law...Newspeak, Oldstory.....

[Paladin2]

SCOTUS have made themselves irrelevant. With Traitor Roberts in the lead.

[mrsloungitude]

The Supreme Court is one of the symbols of the continued decline of our republic. I fear for future generations.