Securing the Rule of Law Through Interpretive Pluralism: An Argument from Comparative Law
Securing the Rule of Law Through Interpretive Pluralism: An Argument from Comparative Law
Richard Stith, 35 Hastings Const. L.Q. 401 (2008)
This Article will argue that total consolidation of legal interpretation in a single high court is a mistake in an age where judges themselves, throughout the world, believe less and less that law is science rather than politics. Omnipotent politicians are potentially lawless despots.
Since an intellectual revival of something like legal science seems unlikely, for reasons discussed in section III below, this Article proposes an institutional remedy for the politicization of legal interpretation that so threatens the rule of law. High court judges (and others) should be given new structural incentives to persuade others of the correctness of their legal decisions, for in so doing they will tend to anchor those decisions firmly in accepted law.