1984—No legal text can ever be clear enough to avoid being subverted by a liberal judicial activist. Consider future-Eleventh Circuit judge Rosemary Barkett’s ruling for a Florida appellate court in State v. Bivona.
Florida’s speedy-trial rule generally provided that every person charged with a felony shall be brought to trial within 180 days of the charge or be forever protected from prosecution on that charge. Under an express exception ((b)(1)) to the rule, a “person who is … incarcerated in a jail or correctional institution outside the jurisdiction of this State … is not entitled to the benefit of this Rule until that person returns or is returned to the jurisdiction of the court within which the Florida charge is pending.” But Barkett rules that the 180-day period for a person who had been charged with bank robbery in Florida ran while he was incarcerated in California, as she reads into the (b)(1) exception the additional requirement that the person have been incarcerated on charges pending in the other state.
Some two years later, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously reverses Barkett’s ruling. “The language of (b)(1),” it concludes, “is without ambiguity…. Clearer language than this is difficult to envisage. Yet the lower court [i.e., Barkett] puts a gloss on it, unwarranted by anything that appears in [the speedy-trial rule].”
2002—Liberal judicial activists, usually so dismissive of originalist jurisprudence, will resort to originalist, or at least originalist-sounding, arguments when it suits them.
In a lengthy historical exegesis in Silveira v. Lockyer, Ninth Circuit judge Stephen Reinhardt concludes that the Second Amendment does not confer any individual right to own or possess any firearms but instead “affords only a collective right.” Among other things, Reinhardt determines that the term “bear arms” “generally referred to the carrying of arms in military service—not the private use of arms for personal purposes,” and that the term “keep” (in “keep and bear arms”) was not broader in scope than “bear.”
Dissenting months later from the denial of rehearing en banc, Judge Alex Kozinski observes:
“Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted.… When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases—or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text.… But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there. It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as spring-boards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us.”
In another opinion dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc, Judge Andrew Kleinfeld (joined by Kozinski and two other judges) criticizes Reinhardt for “swim[ming] against a rising tide of legal scholarship to the contrary, relying heavily on a single law review article”—by a former Reinhardt clerk, as it happens—“that claims ‘keep and bear’ means the same thing as ‘bear,’ which itself means only to carry arms as part of a military unit.” “The military meaning,” Kleinfeld acknowledges, “is certainly among the meanings of ‘bear,’ as is ‘large, heavily built, furry, four-legged mammal,’ and ‘investor pessimistic about the stock market.’ But the primary meaning of ‘bear’ is ‘to carry,’ as when we arrive at our host’s home ‘bearing gifts’ and arrive at the airport ‘bearing burdens.’” And “keep,” Kleinfeld points out, has the primary meaning of “to retain possession of”—and poses an interpretive challenge only for “those who have chosen in advance to evade the ordinary meaning of the word.” Kleinfeld also explains that the phrase “the right of the people”—which Reinhardt “simply skips over”—refers to an individual right in the usage of the Bill of Rights.
In June 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, all nine justices will reject Reinhardt’s “collective right” position (even as they split 5-4 on the scope of the individual Second Amendment right).
2008—Montana trial judge Dorothy McCarter rules (in Baxter v. Montana) that the provisions of the Montana constitution that state that the “dignity of the human being is inviolable” and that set forth a “right of individual privacy” confer a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Never mind the longtime prohibition in Montana law, and Anglo-American law more generally, on assisted suicide.
One year later, the Montana supreme court will decline to ratify McCarter’s constitutional frolic, as a narrow majority instead misconstrues Montana statutory law to protect a physician from prosecution for aiding a person to commit suicide.
2017—Federal district judge William Alsup files in the Supreme Court his own brief disputing the federal government’s motion for a stay of his order that would have required it to disclose all documents bearing on its rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (“DACA”) policy. Two weeks later, in a unanimous opinion, the Court will grant the government’s motion.
2018—No Catholics need apply? In written questions following his hearing, Democratic senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono grill Brian C. Buescher, a nominee to a district-judge seat in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization.
In response, Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard will strongly condemn Hirono and Harris for “fomenting religious bigotry.” (In July 2019, the Senate will confirm Buescher’s nomination.)