Stone found no such consistency in votes of the five most conservative justices in the 20 major cases. The pattern of their decisions cannot, he argued, be explained by either of the two major intellectual themes of conservative legal thinking, judicial restraint and originalism.
“Something is motivating them other than a completely neutral detachment. They chose to be activist in certain types of areas, and strike down law when laws disadvantage the wealthy,” Stone said in my telephone conversation with him. The conservative majority takes “an aggressive, muscular approach” in striking down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but then “suddenly becomes very passive in deferring to the legislature in the voter ID case.”
Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier?
In this dramatization of transcripts from a legal deposition, a lawyer becomes embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier.
How Putin Plays the Law
Coincidentally, even as he defended Russia’s effective annexation of Ukrainian territory as upholding the Crimean people’s right to self-determination, Putin signed a law criminalizing public calls for the violation of “the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.” What this means, in theory, is that any Crimean resident—now Russian citizen—who speaks out publicly against the annexation can be fined or sentenced to a jail term.
.. Russia has become strong enough, Putin seems to suggest, to be as bad as the United States: to do as it pleases, to legitimate its aggression, and to act without a go-ahead from the U.N.
.. The pseudo-legality is simply a way to demonstrate who has the power.
The Law is there to restrain power, not to serve it.
But Mr Putin has emptied the law of significance, by warping reality to mean whatever he chooses. He has argued that fascists threaten the safety of Russian-speakers in Ukraine; that the elite troops surrounding Ukrainian bases are not Russian, but irregulars who bought their uniforms in the shops; that the Budapest memorandum, which Russia signed in 1994 and guarantees Ukraine’s borders, is no longer valid because the government in Kiev has been overthrown. Such preposterous claims are not meant to be taken at face value. Instead they communicate a truth that ordinary Russians understand only too well: the law is there not to restrain power, but to serve it.