If the cliched legal admonition that hard cases make bad law is true, then no matter how the U.S. Supreme Court decides Snyder v. Phelps, the result will be wretched. The Phelps in this instance are Fred Phelps and two of his daughters, both members of the Topeka, Kan.-based Westboro Baptist Church their father founded and still directs. It is a tiny, vilely cultish congregation consisting almost entirely of the elder Phelps' extended family and espousing virulent hatred of gays and lesbians, Catholics, Jews, the U.S. government ... and Swedes. In recent years, Westboro members have gone about the country picketing the funerals of servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. They hold up signs proclaiming that God hates homosexuals and, because the military endorses "don't ask, ...
Without a conservative theory of constitutional interpretation, [Harriet Miers] will lay the groundwork for a million more Roes. We're told she has terrific "common sense." Common sense is the last thing you want in a judge! The maxim, "Hard cases make bad law," could be expanded to, "Hard cases being decided by judges with 'common sense' make unfathomably bad law.
... case,” and “no man is permitted to try cases where he has an interest in the outcome,” id., a... responsibilities for village finances may make him partisan to maintain the high level of contrib...
There's an old saying that hard cases make bad law. The same rule, unfortunately, applies to presidential decisions. What makes a case hard, of course, is when there is no "good" answer. The challenge for the decision maker is to find the least of the bad, the lesser of the evils. But by definition, a bad answer doesn't solve things (if it did, it wouldn't be a bad answer), but merely leaves them less bad than they would be if you made a different choice.
Hard cases make bad law. That adage explains the concoction by a federal appeals court of a constitutional right of terminally ill patients to override the Food and Drug Administration's dubious restrictions on the sale of new drugs in Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Esenbach (May 2, 2006). As Justice Benjamin Cardozo taught, the Constitution leaves room for large slabs of government folly. Paternalism is the signature of the FDA. Generally speaking, patients are denied the opportunity to purchase drugs with a full awareness of their risks and benefits unless they have been proven both safe and effective to the FDA. The approval process typically consumes about seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The incentive to discover new drugs is dulled, es...
UST SHY of eight years after they squared off in the Florida recount battle, James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher have joined forces to clean up one of the ugly legacies of Vietnam the misguided piece of legislation called the War Powers Act. Passed in 1973, when Congress was mightily frustrated with the undeclared war in Southeast Asia, that statute is proof of the adage that hard cases make bad law. Cases don't come any harder than Vietnam, and the War Powers Act has turned out to be one of the worst bills ever to reach the president's desk and be signed into law.
WASHINGTON -- Just shy of eight years after they squared off in the Florida recount battle, James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher have joined forces to clean up one of the ugly legacies of Vietnam: the misguided piece of legislation called the War Powers Act. Passed in 1973 when Congress was mightily frustrated with the undeclared war in Southeast Asia, that statute is proof of the adage that hard cases make bad law. Cases don't come any harder than Vietnam, and the War Powers Act has turned out to be one of the worst bills ever to reach the president's desk and be signed into law.
Hard cases, they say, make bad law. The case of Laura Susan Reynolds, just brought to the Supreme Court on a money-lender's petition for appeal, is about as hard a case as you're likely to find. Judge John R. Gibson spelled out the facts last October in his opinion for the 8th Circuit. Much condensed, the story begins when Mrs. Reynolds began suffering from depressive symptoms in junior high school. The symptoms worsened during her college years. She dropped out of a foreign study program, but kept struggling toward a degree. Despite persistent depression and panic attacks, she was able to graduate cum laude from Claremont McKenna College in California.
In April in these pages, in a piece titled "God and the Devil in Texas," I pointed up the differences between the cases of Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney, two Texas mothers who had killed their children under the delusion that they had been commanded to act - Mrs. Laney by God, Mrs. Yates by Satan. I voiced the possibility that the nature of the sources of the commands might well have played a part in the outcomes, and that this was insufficient grounds to distinguish the two cases: Laney was found legally insane, Yates criminally responsible. As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed a century ago, great cases like hard cases make bad law. George Dix, professor of law at the University of Texas, was persuaded that Yates' conviction was reversed on Jan. 6 primarily because "it's such a difficult...
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