[Newspoetry] William O Douglas: Entirely right, but why?

[Donald L Emerick]

William O Douglas:
Entirely right, but why?

Member of Supreme Court,
William O Douglas was once.
The Nation printed a review
of new Wild Bill biography,
that shows us the man,
partly, to give comparison
to a portrait in the biobook.

That is, we have a critic
who critiques a biography
based upon combinations:
what reviewer felt of WOD,
of other bios or graphers.

It was a fair piece of writing,
as far as such writings go,
for it tells us quite honestly
how reviewer sees all this.

But, I was unhappy, anyway,
despite good faith objectivity.
What I did not accept as right
was a critical value laid out --
the value of WOD's opinions
to techno-legal apparatchiks.
Reviewer complained of WOD:
while his decisions were right,
he never fussed in writing them.
This left legal scholars no legacy
of solid well-reasoned opinions,
upon which they could ever rely,
to show in their present citations.

Personally, having read such things,
the good ones and the bad ones,
the only thing that matters to me
or to petitioners before the Court
is indeed the decision majority,
who won a verdict in court order?

Only technocrats want authority
to state, as principles of authority,
why authority is deciding this way.
Since the decisions are final,
the opinions are almost trivia,
as they only have, traditionally,
admonitory, exhortatory value,
merely this, and nothing more.
The Court does not make Law,
it merely applies Laws to cases,
and explains how Law fits each,
in the supposedly honest judgment
of the allegedly honest justices.

However, what if you come to think,
as I most certainly have, in review,
that some justices are dishonest?
Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist
lie far beyond highly suspicious,
when I come to items of honesty,
for I have seen them torture texts,
as alleged precedents of authority,
that their authors would disavow,
as warped and twisted out of shape.
It is a grave intellectual dishonesty
to convert the dead into your allies,
merely because it pleasures you
to think that your dead enemies
now can be forced to serve you.

Personally, I do not care one fig
for official explanations of cases;
I think they are an extreme vanity,
an ugly growth out of common law,
when judges necessarily made law,
because the law was unlegislated.
(I believe, also, law is unlegislatable
for any other person than yourself,
but, if you are under a self-stricture,
then the other may be a free rider,
and fall under same rules as you.)
Thus, with many law commentators
throughout the nation's law schools,
and in many hallways and byways,
there is simply no need for opinions
from the authors of a legal decision.
Indeed, such official authors clog
and block workings of democracy,
by elevating their opinion too high,
to stratospheric levels without air,
to strangle democratic arguments,
about what law is and how it works.

And, that is what liberals need most
to remember: the results count most.
How you reached your right opinion,
as a matter of reconstructive reason,
may be undetermined or uncertain,
but, as decisions are made first,
before any case for them appears,
what matters most is how you vote
on critical issues, not your reason.
And, that is why I criticize values,
as they appear in voting patterns,
saying that some are wrong for us,
saying that some are right for us,
and saying why that happens so
to some of us, or even to all of us.

I am but Nietzsche's values critic,
who praises and condemns living,
according to how it seems to him,
to be structured to help or hurt us.
As Wild Bill did this, too, so I say.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20030418/dfd4fc1d/attachment.html