If you're looking for an example of what law should not be, see Tuesday's jumble of a hearing before the Supreme Court of the United States, which looked less supreme than directionless as one justice after another got to put his two cents (or less) into those free-wheeling proceedings.
Clarity and finality. Weren't those once the aim of appellate decisions that would clarify and reconcile different circuit courts' different readings of the law? Instead, the court's session Tuesday might be summed up as one grand muddle, a patch of fog left unilluminated by the headlights of passing traffic as events even now hurtle by, moving faster than the law can comprehend.
Anyone looking for a pattern to the justices' questions, observations, and general philosophical wanderings would look in vain.
Clarity, finality? All was murk and flux last week. Maybe that's because, once again, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed destined to cast the swing vote on a pressing issue before the court, this time whether the Constitution of the United States requires the states (a) to recognize a right to same-sex marriages, and (b) whether those same states must recognize such marriages if they're legal in other states.
The court's discussion of those questions was marked by anything but clarity and finality. Which could also be said of Mr. Justice Kennedy's earlier decisions on this persistent issue, which were anything but decisive. And may explain why the court has had to deal with these same questions again and again. Call him the court's Great Undecider.
Gentle Reader may have noticed that the country does not yet have an ideal system of jurisprudence. If it had anything approaching one, questions like these would be addressed directly, systematically and practically--and the high court would then decide them the same way.
Instead, the odds are that Justice Kennedy's "decisive" ruling this summer will again be marked by so many exceptions, reservations, and gratuitous dicta that the law governing these issues will remain as murky as before the justice left his muddy fingerprints all over it.
Justice delayed, it seems, is not only justice denied, but justice forever confused.
Editorial on 05/03/2015