Eric Segall Blog on On Judicial Candor, Judge Posner, and the Supreme Court (3/26/15)

I just posted this blog entry on my Federal Tax Procedure Blog and thought readers of this blog might like it as well.

Eric Segall posted this blog on the Dorf on Law Blog:  On Judicial Candor, Judge Posner, and the Supreme Court (Dorf on Law 3/23/15), here.  I think readers of this blog might be interested in it. The whole blog entry is very short.  Offer selected snippets as as teasers to read the whole blog entry:

On Judicial Candor:

Agreement broke down, however, when we discussed what level of candor we should expect from judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular. I argued that it is inappropriate for the Supreme Court to hide behind standard and misleading methods of constitutional interpretation such as precedent, text, and historical analysis when we all know (per our acceptance of the realist critique) that decisions are generated more by what Judge Posner calls “priors” and what I call values writ large, than by legal doctrine. This problem is more pronounced at the Supreme Court than other courts because the Justices choose the hardest cases, there is the most at stake, and there is no effective review of their decisions. 

Judge Posner argued strenuously that I was holding judges in general and the Supreme Court in particular to a standard of candor that we do not place on members of Congress, the President, and other public officials. Judge Posner stated that we know politicians are not candid about the reasons motivating their political choices and we should not be surprised that judges do the same. Judge Posner did distinguish between affirmatively lying, which judges should not do, and not disclosing the true bases of decisions, which he felt was inevitable.

So, Judge Posner is a  proponent that judges can lie, so long as they do not affirmatively lie.  (OK, I pulled a snippet and that is unfair; read the whole blog entry.)

On Originalism (Real or Feigned):

I argued that federal judges are governmental officials appointed for life who exercise coercive power over us and the rule of law requires they tell the litigants and the public the true reasons for their decisions (as best they can). For example, I have argued that Justices Scalia and Thomas quite clearly do not follow an originalist methodology across huge portions of constitutional law and they should stop pretending that they do. Judge Posner suggested that it is quite possible they think originalism drives their decisions and their failure to own up to the priors that actually generate their decisions is based more on a lack of self-reflection than bad faith. I quibbled that since just about everyone outside the Court agrees doctrine does not really drive decisions, that lack of self-reflection on the part of the Justices was a bit alarming. Professor Chen, who earlier in the discussion made a similar point, was sympathetic to this suggestion.