Impartial Justice

This book examines the right to a neutral and detached decisionmaker as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. This right resides in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees to procedural due process and in the Sixth Amendment’s promise of an impartial jury. Supreme Court cases on these topics are the vehicles to understand how these constitutional rights have come alive. First, the book surveys the right to an impartial jury in criminal cases by telling the stories of defendants whose convictions were overturned after they were the victims of prejudicial pretrial publicity, mob justice, and discriminatory jury selection. Next, the book articulates how our modern notion of judicial impartiality was forged by the Court striking down cases where judges were bribed, where they had other direct financial stakes in the outcome of the case, and where a judge decided the case of a major campaign supporter. Finally, the book traces the development of the right to a neutral decisionmaker in quasi-judicial, non-court settings, including cases involving parole revocation, medical license review, mental health commitments, prison discipline, and enemy combatants. Each chapter begins with the typically shocking facts of these cases being retold, and each chapter ends with a critical examination of the Supreme Court’s ultimate decisions in these cases.

This publication is the latest in a series of steps to assist judges in carrying out their onerous responsibilities, and represents a concise yet comprehensive set of principles addressing the many difficult ethical issues that confront judges as they work and live in their communities. It also provides a sound basis to promote a more complete understanding of the role of the judge in society and of the ethical dilemmas they so often encounter. Sections of the publication cover the following: the purpose of the publication; judicial independence; integrity; diligence; equality; and impartiality, including judicial demeanour, civic and charitable activity, political activity, and conflicts of interest.

In this book, Shane O'Neill argues that the theory of justice must take seriously two dimensions of pluralism in the modern world. While it must acknowledge the plurality of individual conceptions of the good that is characteristic of every modern society, it must also reckon with the plurality of historically unique, culturally specific, political societies. O'Neill offers a distinctive perspective on an extremely significant current debate about universalism and particularism in political philosophy. Justice, he maintains, must be understood both in terms of an impartial point of view that respects differing conceptions of the good and in relation to the particular contexts in which disputes about norms and principles arise. Liberals, most notably John Rawls, have tended to privilege the former aspect of justice, while communitarians, especially Michael Walzer, have stressed the latter. O'Neill shows how Habermas's discourse ethics can overcome the limitations of these alternatives by providing theoretical tools that allow us to ground impartiality in particular contexts. This position is developed through an exploration of the complementary roles of moral and ethical discourses and an application of the theory to the political conflict in Northern Ireland. This careful and detailed philosophical argument offers a valuable critical introduction to a range of important topics, including the communitarian critique of liberalism, feminist perspectives on justice, the interpretive turn in political philosophy, the theory of communicative action, the dynamics of a discursive democracy, and the politics of recognition.

Unjust by Design describes a system in need of major restructuring. Written by a respected critic, it presents a modern theory of administrative justice fit for that purpose. It also provides detailed blueprints for the changes the author believes would be necessary if justice were to in fact assume its proper role in Canada’s administrative justice system.

A distinguished and experienced appellate court judge, Richard A. Posner offers in this new book a unique and, to orthodox legal thinkers, a startling perspective on how judges and justices decide cases. When conventional legal materials enable judges to ascertain the true facts of a case and apply clear pre-existing legal rules to them, Posner argues, they do so straightforwardly; that is the domain of legalist reasoning. However, in non-routine cases, the conventional materials run out and judges are on their own, navigating uncharted seas with equipment consisting of experience, emotions, and often unconscious beliefs. In doing so, they take on a legislative role, though one that is confined by internal and external constraints, such as professional ethics, opinions of respected colleagues, and limitations imposed by other branches of government on freewheeling judicial discretion. Occasional legislators, judges are motivated by political considerations in a broad and sometimes a narrow sense of that term. In that open area, most American judges are legal pragmatists. Legal pragmatism is forward-looking and policy-based. It focuses on the consequences of a decision in both the short and the long term, rather than on its antecedent logic. Legal pragmatism so understood is really just a form of ordinary practical reasoning, rather than some special kind of legal reasoning. Supreme Court justices are uniquely free from the constraints on ordinary judges and uniquely tempted to engage in legislative forms of adjudication. More than any other court, the Supreme Court is best understood as a political court.

Throughout his study, Bushnell investigates the question of the absence of an independent judicial tradition in Canada and the development of distinct legal doctrine by the Supreme Court. He analyses the nature and cause of the lack of independent thought that makes the Court "captive" to inherited traditions and legal doctrines and prevents it from achieving its true potential within the Canadian legal system. Previous studies of the Court have concentrated on the years after 1949; by expanding the coverage to include the first three-quarters of a century of the Court's existence, Bushnell has uncovered a critical aspect of Canadian legal history. Bushnell provides an analysis of more than eighty cases decided by the Court between 1876 and 1989. He examines the backgrounds and views of the sixty-seven judges who served on the Supreme Court during this period, evaluating both the role they felt they played in Canadian society and the role others expected them to play. He studies the question of the right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and its effect on the Supreme Court, as well as the movement toward the abolition of appeal. In the concluding part of the study Bushnell considers the controversy over the demand for impartial justice, criticism of the judiciary, and the judges who will take the Court into the twenty-first century.

The debate between impartialists and their critics has dominated both moral and political philosophy during the 1990s. This book attempts to show both that the dispute between impartialists and their critics runs very deep, and that it can nonetheless be resolved.