Confirmation Hearing for PiT (The Physicist) for Associate Justice (South)

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I would like to thank the members of this body for their consideration, as well as Governor tmthforu for his support.

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     I am strongly of the opinion that justice can only be served when its ministers adhere to the process required of them. The rule of law is instituted to protect the citizens from the government running amok, and the enforcement of those rules and the system as created is critical to that protection. An independent judiciary that stands above partisan or ideological interests and serves only justice is what the institutions of Atlasian government demands, and that expectation is something that I believe must be the Associate Justice's duty to fulfill.

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     In general I consider myself originalist, in the sense that I see a doctrine of "original meaning" as important to maintaining a stable understanding of the Constitution and therefore a stable continuity of respect for the rights of the people to the present day and into the future. The textualist approach differs in that it seeks to derive understanding of the law from a reading of the plain text of the law itself.

     While this difference is important in the context of the United States, a short enough time has passed in Atlasia that I do not see these approaches as being markedly different. Nevertheless, I see an originalist approach as implying reference and deference to the philosophical principles that underlie the Constitution and that give it meaning as a foundational document. The concept of textualism carries no such implication, and as such I have less confidence in it as a practice of jurisprudence.

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     The principle of stare decisis becomes quite weak where it threatens the rights of the people of Atlasia. Above I referred to a stable continuity of respect for the rights of the people, but the flipside of this is that there is no place for the courts to assist in attacking those rights. The classic example of this is the IRL case of Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court made the correct decision and overturned the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, because it recognized that the practice of school segregation denied African-Americans equal protection under the law. In such instances, upholding precedent is little more than a plaintive cry, and not a position to be seriously entertained.

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     My understanding is that the Constitution is mum on the issue, though this is something that has seen little litigation in the Atlasian courts and I would be very open to arguments on the matter. The traditional argument invoked with Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade would be that abortion rights fall under the liberties guaranteed by Article I, Section 5, though I find such an argument less than convincing considering that the crux of the matter, the question of whether a fetus should be granted the protections of human life, is left unaddressed by the Constitution and is a hotly contested issue among the citizenry.

     In short, I do not believe that the Constitution either provides for or denies a woman's right to choose.

[Associate Justice PiT]

In the pursuit of originalist understanding would you for instance use statements and posts made in the Constitutional Convention as a guide for understanding particular provisions of the constitution? 

     I do think there is a place for original intent, but it is necessarily limited. The problem that conservative jurists ran into with the doctrine of original intent was that it was often difficult to ascribe a singular intent to the framers, who were a large group of people with varying interests and goals. Likewise, the Atlasian Constitution and any bills passed by its legislative bodies did so with the assent of a group of people who carry varying ideologies and who may have had different reasons for supporting the bill.

     In short, yes I would use specific statements and posts to better understand relevant law, but these generally won't be the items that I place the greatest weight on in building my opinion.

What is your opinion of the current supreme court, how would you describe the ideology of each justice?

     I think the court runs very well, and does its job when called upon. Of its current membership, you as the Chief Justice have been the most visible by far in the cases that have come before the court, so I can comment most concretely on your ideology, or the court as a whole (for the demarcating line is often not clear). In the case TimTurner v. Peebs, the court was faced with a difficult decision of balancing voter rights with practical application. In this case the stare decisis opinion proved to be the correct one, because it was arrived at with an eye to smoothly administering elections while also preserving the rights of the voters. Looking at both this and the more straightforward case Poirot v. Peebs, I would characterize the court's approach as a reasonably textualist one, lending due weight to concerns of enforceability and application.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I would like to thank the Delegates of the South for their confidence and support.