High Court of Australia judge Crennan on post modernism and the law
Submitted by Margo Kingston on June 28, 2007 - 6:03pm.
Margo: Now for something completely different, High Court justice Susan
Crennan delivered this speech today, in Chicago, on some post-modern
theories and how they help "accommodate contested values and policy
considerations" in the law. I bettcha Howard's Aboriginal legislation will
get a run in the High Court. And noone is mentioning the fact that the
Racial Discrimination Act will have to be overriden big time. Declaring
martial law based on race is a big call. Justice Crennan, Australia's only
female Hight Court Justice was appointed in late 2005. Her first speech is
here. Webdiary reported her appointment here.
Scepticism and Judicial Method
In the relevant scholarly literature, scepticism has animated debates over
the relationship between law and morality and the differences between
utilitarian or positivist and reason-based theories of the law. Scepticism
has also haunted the debate over the extent to which judges and judicial
methods can or should accommodate contested values and policy
considerations. These high philosophical themes oblige me to explain
immediately that the aim of this paper is modest. It is to consider briefly
certain cultural theories associated with Continental philosophers such as
Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as they might
interest practising barristers.
I know it would be a mistake to assume French philosophers agree with or
about each other. When Voltaire extravagantly praised the poet and
physiologist von Haller to Casanova, Casanova replied that the admiration
was not mutual. In fact, Casanova said that when he recently spoke to von
Haller, von Haller disparaged Voltaire. After a thoughtful pause Voltaire
replied: 'Perhaps we are both mistaken.'
Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault are all members of the postmodern pantheon.
They are associated with currents of thought responding to political and
social conditions of the modern state, and said to constitute an enabling
ideology for improving those political and social conditions. Broadly
speaking, postmodern thinkers reject established values, grand narrative and
the possibility of objective truth or knowledge. They oppose whatever they
consider to be authoritarian or elitist and they encourage relativism and
pluralism. Such thinking has fuelled some of the debates referred to as the
culture wars.
Those who have most appropriated postmodern ideology in legal circles are
liable to describe themselves simultaneously as 'subversive' and
'progressive', a formulation, or boast, which of itself immediately reflects
the difficulty of seeking radical change in a justice system which has the
confidence of the community.
Insofar as they relate to the law, the culture wars reflect a struggle
between a desire to preserve our justice system as it is because it enforces
normative behaviour, on the one hand, and a quite incompatible desire to be
progressively liberated from those norms, on the other.
Postmodern cultural theories are contrarian and profoundly sceptical. They
are regularly expressed in obdurately opaque language. They have proved
enormously popular and influential in the academy, in Australia, America and
elsewhere, especially in the humanities – in history, literature and
philosophy. .
While the tide has now turned in those fields in the academy, the influence
of such thinking has spread to both legal scholars and legal policy makers.
There is an easily discernible flavour of such thinking in the way in which
contemporary debates are framed over old antinomies between 'justice' and
'law', and between 'strict legalism' (or 'originalism') and 'judicial
activism'. Legal textbooks and casebooks first published this year show and
even acknowledge their indebtedness to postmodern thinking.
Postmodern theories are also explicitly echoed in a more structural
critique of our justice system. It is said that the law is a repressive
construct and that the judges who administer it are part of an elite, or
hegemony, and have understandings of justice and pluralism which are
concomitantly incomplete. Such critiques have had their influence on calls
for a different judiciary and for the transfer or dilution of the
Executive's powers of appointing judges.
Barristers commonly react to postmodern theory with some degree of alarm
and puzzlement, not least because those seeking to implement such theories
in the justice system seem to display deeply paradoxical attitudes. On the
one hand, they sometimes seem barely able to suppress their contempt for the
present state of the law and our legal institutions and have armed
themselves for battle with a strong belief in the transformative powers of a
coercive bundle of social strategies known as political correctness. Yet on
the other hand, they accept that the rule of law is central to our liberal
democracy.
It is not my purpose to attempt any comprehensive critique of the theories
I have mentioned. Nor do I suggest that there is anything wrong with
challenges, even most radical and profound challenges, to our social
institutions, or with profound questioning of our legal sanctions or the
working assumptions behind them. That is one of the freedoms of living in a
modern liberal democracy. What I would like to consider is some of the fine
detail of the scepticism, that of Foucault in particular, and to consider
that particular type of scepticism in the context of judicial method.
It would not be possible to do proper justice to the range, the subtleties
and the nuances of postmodern thinking in the space of a short paper and I
refer to Lyotard and Derrida no more that is necessary for the purposes of
mentioning pervasive concepts associated with their names.
Jean-François Lyotard (1928-1998) is best known to English speakers for his
work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. One of Lyotard's best
known ideas is that accounts of human history consist of 'grand' or 'meta'
narratives which, while focussing on events, at the same time suppress
alternative versions of such events. The version of events suppressed is
identified as the version which could be told by those in some sort of
subordinate relationship to the cultural mainstream.
That idea has resonances in the practice of history. For example, EP
Thompson in his preface to The Making of The English Working Class states
that he is writing the history of the 'lacemakers' and others, the figures
normally effaced in historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution, in
order to rescue them from what he calls 'the enormous condescension of
posterity.' In Australia, the search for, and the presentation of,
alternative narratives has most notably been found in an expansion of
studies of indigenous history and women's history.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is perhaps most famous in the English speaking
world for a process of reading, or a philosophical strategy, which he calls
deconstruction and which bears on the relationship between thought and
language. Stated simply, Derrida questions the assumption that a word and
the object it designates are the same, or that a word and an action it
describes are the same. Words for Derrida not only have numerous meanings,
but also those multiple meanings are often themselves contradictory. Once
that premise of linguistic ambiguity is accepted, it follows, so the
argument goes, that a multiplicity of interpretations of any text, or any
historical event is possible, if not inescapable.
Legal thinkers and historians have long recognised, of course, that the
search for a definitive interpretation of complex historical events eludes
success. Sir Owen Dixon noted this in the context of of his own times in
Concerning Judicial Method, the speech delivered at Yale in 1955. He said of
the then practice of history: 'History concedes the validity of a diversity
of subjective interpretations.'
Following the idea of deconstruction, Derrida also coined the word
'differance' to express the idea of the multiple (even unfinished) meanings
in any text. If one were taxed with expressing the essence of postmodern
thought in its civil application in a single sentence it might run like
this: 'postmodernism suggests that civil communities and the political and
legal institutions which govern those communities should develop and
implement a much greater tolerance of difference, ie diversity, among
community members.' It does not follow that administrative action jusitified
by some mantra derived from such a formula will necessarily have the
propounded effect, nor that the purpose will be precisely as claimed, no
more than that a republic founded on Virtue will necessariy be virtuous.
History, or experience, enforces a quite different conclusion.
Central to the thinking of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), to whom I now turn,
was the idea that social and political institutions, and particularly the
law, were mechanisms by which elites, or what he styled hegemonies,
exercised power through mechanisms of coercion and regulation. He is known
for his historical investigations into what he terms discourses. For him, a
discourse is a field of both specialised knowledge and practices, by
reference to which power is exercised. Power and knowledge for him are one
and the same. He was not the first to observe the connection, although he
perhaps inverted what Bacon expressed in his aphorism: scientia potentia
est. Of course, the two men attached very different value to scientia.
Foucault's most challenging ideas in relation to the law are: (1) the idea
that a person is a rational individual is a figment of Enlightenment
thinking; (2) the idea that truth is relative – that is, 'truth' is truth
for someone or some group, but it is never objective in the empirical sense;
and (3) his idea that legal prohibitions on certain human conduct,
particularly sexual conduct, reflected nothing more complicated than a
repressive assertion of majoritarian views. As one critic said of postmodern
theories generally, 'what is under assault here is the normative'.
I heard recently of a patient shocked by his surgeon's boast that he was a
postmodernist. When the patient nervously queried the impact of these
beliefs on his professional life the surgeon said: 'No need to worry. Truth
is relative but medical science is accurate enough for practical purposes.'
Although I touch on each of the three ideas of Foucault mentioned, let me
concentrate for a minute on 'truth' and judicial method. When Sir Owen Dixon
made reference to Pilate's question: 'What is truth?', he noted that Pilate
did not wait for an answer because he was 'about to leave the judgment
hall.' Here, and elsewhere, Sir Owen Dixon was emphasising that those 'in
the judgment hall', judges under a duty to judge, are required to establish
truth or, putting it another way, reach a correct result.
Foucault frankly acknowledged Nietzsche's influence on his views of the
relativity of truth. Nietzsche's answer to Pilate's question 'What is
truth?' was as follows: 'A mobile host of metaphors, metonymies and
anthromorphisms ... Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions.' That conception of truth cannot easily be reconciled with a
judge's sworn duty to 'do justice according to law', which is predicated
upon findings of by the trier of fact about the truth of past events.
However, a sceptical attitude to truth encourages some reconsideration of
the institutional and other limitations on judging, a topic to which I will
return.
Before going any further, in a work just as influential as the works of the
Continental philosophers I have mentioned, Karl Popper in The Logic of
Scientific Discovery (1959) argued that no scientific hypothesis could be
proven to be absolutely true. And Albert Einstein is most remembered for his
theory of relativity in relation to time and space. Suggestive as the
analogies might appear, however, it might come as a surprise to Popper or
Einstein, or Heisenberg, Shrödinger or Plack, for that matter, to find
Foucoult nominated as their spiritual heir.
In any event, let me allow Foucault to speak for himself.
Foucault on the Enlightenment
In Truth and Method, Part 1, Foucault said the Enlightenment 'has
determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do
today.' He refers to Kant's description of the Enlightenment 'as the moment
when humanity is going to put its own reason to use...' He thinks of the
Enlightenment 'as a set of political, economic, social, institutional and
cultural events on which we still depend' which propounded the tradition of
rationalism as a means of ordering human affairs.
Foucault on Sovereignty
Foucault explains that his reaction against unquestioning acceptance of
values traditionally associated with the Enlightenment, specifically
humanism and rationalism, is an attempt by him to recalibrate what is and
what is not 'indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous
subjects.'
Hence his interest in all forms of sovereignty or authority over others
including the law. His historical studies of 'power/knowledge' in
psychiatric institutions and prisons were intended to explicate the
political and economic structures of modern society and to challenge the
traditional view that reason explains the framework of the law.
Power/knowledge is a key Foucauldian epistemological concept set up in
radical opposition to any reconciliations of human instinct and culture, for
example through science or law.
He said he wanted to study the 'problem of power' because '... [o]n the
right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, etc that is,
in juridicial terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the
state apparatus.' He inverted Clausewitz's formula to: 'politics is the
continuation of war by other means.'
In 'The Carceral', the final section of Discipline and Punish (first
published in 1975), Foucault explains his theory that the institution of the
law, as it has developed in modern society, goes further than merely
criminalising offences which are attacks on the common interest. In other
words law, as an institution, reaches far beyond the social contractarian
theories of Hobbes, of Locke (and of Rousseau). Foucault asserts that the
institutions which replaced the sovereign's power which he identifies as
'the school, the court, the asylum and the prison' penalise 'departure from
the norm' rather than penalising behaviour which really threatens the
autonomy of members of the community.
This is his main complaint about social and political arrangements of
modern nation states, including liberal democracies such as our own. He
perceives the law, at least in part, as an instrument of repressive social
cohesion because it insufficiently tolerates ways of living, ie expressions
of human autonomy, which pose no genuine threat to civil peace or the good
of other members of the community.
Foucault on Truth
Foucault says 'Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics"
of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes
function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to
distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is
sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition
of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as
true.'
He emphasised when referring to truth he was not referring to facts to be
discovered and accepted, as in science; rather he said he was speaking about
'truth' as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation,
distribution, circulation and operation of statements.' He described his
intellectual enterprise as being about 'detaching the power of truth from
the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it
operates at the present time', law being in his view a form or expression of
hegemony.
Foucault on Repression
Foucault considers repression to be 'emblematic of what we call bourgeois
societies.' For him, disciplinary power was an invention of bourgeois
society designed to maintain community cohesion.
On that note and against that background, Foucault's last and unfinished
work, The History of Sexuality, Part 1 (first published in 1976) contains a
revealing anecdote. It is about a feeble-minded peasant in Lorraine in 1867
who engages in sexual behaviour with a child. The peasant was then reported,
led by the gendarmes to a judge, who turned him over to a doctor. Foucault
objects to what he would call the 'legalising' and 'medicalising' of the
peasant's behaviour. Human actions we would describe as 'indecent dealing
with a child', and criminal in a person of sound mind, and as meriting some
social and legal sanction and prevention, are described by Foucault as
'inconsequential bucolic pleasures' and as 'barely furtive pleasures between
simple-minded adults and alert children.'
Foucault recounts this anecdote to draw attention to what he regards as the
arbitrariness of definitions framed to describe human behaviour, and the
contingent nature of meaning or truth. This point is repeated in many places
and under many guises throughout his oeuvre. He rejects our culture's long
tradition of belief in objective truths, and the law's use of reason to
establish truth, since 'truths' for him are fashioned by whatever is the
dominant group paradigm or discourse.
Foucault's criticisms of the law, at least in this last work, seem little
more than heuristic devices because he shows no interest in the child in the
anecdote I have described; he is only interested in what happened to the
peasant. He ignores the possibility that categorising human behaviours as
'good' or 'bad', 'permitted' or 'forbidden', can reflect a genuine consensus
of a diverse community rather than some form of repression by a dominant
group. That a community requires protection for its members against certain
behaviours, the prohibition of which is an institutional norm, is an
extremely unremarkable way to organise a complex civil society. Few judges
would think that Foucault got the balance right between the autonomy of the
peasant and the rights of the child.
There is a considerable body of distinguished work in which scholars probe
Foucault's idea that community standards, reflected in legal standards, need
to be reconsidered and reshaped so as to accommodate greater variations in
human behaviour and to reflect greater toleration of different expresssions
of human autonomy.
But, rather than move in that direction, I want to go back for a moment to
think about the charge that our legal institutions reflect and implement
arbitrary governance. To do this involves reflecting on what 'sovereignty'
really means in Australian constitutional history and, before that, English
constitutional history. Sovereignty, that is the power to command others, is
an idea which can no longer be wholly disentangled from the protean concepts
of liberty and equality.
The Army Debates, sometimes referred to as the Puritan or Putney debates,
which commenced in the autumn of 1647 are extremely valuable in revealing
the close detail in political currents in Puritan thought before the Act of
Settlement 1701. First, the one point on which the victors of the First
Civil War were agreed was the need to ensure that any restored King would
need to be bound so as never again to exercise absolute or arbitrary
sovereignty.
Secondly, one of the four groups in the Debates, the Levellers, supported
the idea of manhood suffrage, an idea which never completely left the
English political stage once it had been determined that the sovereignty of
the King was to be shared in some way. Admittedly, it did not come into its
own until the 19th century.
Thirdly, all parties to the Debates had an egalitarian concept of reason.
Reason was thought of as common to all, independent of education. This
underpinned the ardent contemporary belief in free speech – the humblest
person was just as entitled to be convinced or to convince another in
relation to an idea. Debate was thought of as a constructive method for
establishing the truth.
Over 40 years later, James II having left the Kingdom, in the Convention
Parliament of 28 January 1689, Sergeant Maynard asserted '... our government
is mixed, not monarchical and tyrranous, but has had its beginnings from the
people.' Sir Robert Howard said 'The constitution of the government is
actually grounded upon pact and covenant with the people.' Sir Robert Sawyer
observed 'The government is all unto the people, which people we are ...'
Then after the vote to declare the Throne vacant was taken, the House of
Lords was concerned to 'declare the constitution and the rule of
government.'
The Bill of Rights 1689 asserted 'the right of free speech' and provided
that parliaments ought to be held frequently for 'the amending,
strengthening and preserving of the laws.'
These manoeuvres were preliminary to installing a new sovereign on the
basis that 'laws and liberties' were to be preserved. It was recognised by
Parliament that in asserting its own sovereignty it would be necessary to
detach the judiciary from the absolute and arbitrary sovereignty of the
King. Judges, who up until the Constitutional Settlement had been appointed
and removed by the King, were often servile to his wishes. Under the Act of
Settlement 1701 judges were appointed for the first time as independent
judges in terms which remain familiar in our own polity.
Whilst the Constitutional Settlement was not, in terms consonant with
modern understanding of these terms, either liberal or democratic (and it
reflected religious dogma), it nevertheless institutionalised representative
government and divided sovereignty.
Through representative government and the placing of the laws and nominated
liberties in the hands of independent judges, sovereignty in the sense of
power over others became the opposite of absolute and arbitrary. It became
limited and predictable.
Personal liberty involved a freedom to act, including in relation to
property, and a freedom to speak, in any way not prohibited by the law.
Criminal laws could only be prospective. Equality meant everyone was equally
bound and protected by the law, although it did not mean political equality.
The independence of the judiciary existed to protect the community from
arbitrary command.
Blackstone, writing later in the 18th century, not only recognised that the
Constitutional Settlement divided sovereignty between the King, the Lords
and the Commoners, he also considered that the electors who returned members
in the House of Commons exercised sovereignty.
The extent to which the relationship between the subject and the state
thereafter rested on the positive authority of the common law and the
independent judges is well illustrated in a series of cases concerning
general warrants for searching premises. In 1765, Lord Camden was wholly
unimpressed with the arbitrariness of general warrants which for some 80
years after the Settlement had been issued by the executive through the
Secretary of State. He asserted that if the power to issue general warrants
was not to be found 'in our books', ie in common law precedents, it did not
exist. In Wilkes v Wood he instructed a jury that a warrant which did not
identify a particular object of a search was 'totally subversive of the
liberty of the subject.'
In the same context, Blackstone said when speaking judicially 'Every man's
house is his castle'. Pitt the Elder addressed Parliament the following year
in more fulsome terms but to the same effect. These developments resulted in
the enduring rule that warrants and applications for them should be properly
particularised mentioned by Judge Posner in the context of terrorism.
The differing techniques of common law and equity, one looking to precedent
and operating analogically, and the other looking to doctrines intended to
be comprehensive enough to cover novel circumstances, operated together to
avoid arbitrary, ie capricious or unjust, results flowing from conflicting
desires for certainty and flexibility.
What is my point in reaching back in time instead of looking forward in the
context of the particular brand of contemporary scepticism under discussion?
It is this: the unwinding of sovereignty in English constitutional history
and the contemporary ideas of liberty and equality associated with that
particular political development involved the institution of an independent
judiciary to resist arbitrariness in the behaviour of the Crown or
Parliament or the Executive and the differing techniques of common law and
equity were directed to balancing certainty, predictability and flexibility.
When the detail of those developments is considered it does not seem just
to assert that the common law developed as an institution, encouraging
arbitrary command over subjects or as a discipline inimical to pluralism.
The freedoms most essential to pluralism were forged and maintained by a
community and a judiciary set against arbitrariness.
Let me 'fast forward' from the institution of representative government and
the diffusion of sovereignty in late 17th-century England to the forging of
political institutions and government in the mid 19th century in the
Australian colonies and let me take my home State, Victoria, as an example.
Gold was discovered in Victoria on 8 August 1851. The Separation Act from
New South Wales had been in force a mere five weeks. These were the
circumstances of a massive migration to Australia where political structures
as we know them now were in their infancy (as was social infrastructure as
shown by any of the familiar paintings of the time). The centrality of the
gold rushes to nation building is a familiar and popular topic with
Australian historians, not least because the social and economic
circumstances in which 'Jack was as good as his master' led quickly and
inexorably to a demand for a theoretically classless society, to be
expressed by the political equivalent, suffrage without property
qualifications.
The nexus between owning property and being entitled to vote was broken
once itinerant miners had a franchise based on holding a mining licence.
Whilst it is true that upper houses in various colonies, later states,
retained property qualifications, egalitarian theory included at the time
not only equality before the law but also political equality. Despite the
gap between the ideal and the reality, which exists with every ideal,
egalitarian theory suffused public consciousness in Australia prior to
Federation.
On the other hand, 'liberty' and 'equality' had been redefined for the
French in 1789 followed by a very different transition from a monarch with
absolute sovereignty to republican political and legal institutions.
That leads to a twofold caution: first against assuming Foucault's ideas
about the unwinding of sovereignty in France can be transposed, and stand as
accurate analyses of the development of the rule of law in common law
countries, especially our own; secondly, against forgetting the long history
of major liberties such as free speech and freedom from arbitrary search and
detention, which are central to, and protective of pluralism.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth emerged against the colonial
background I have sketched. Sovereignty, in the sense of the power to
command others, is distributed through the separation of powers between the
legislature, the executive and the judicature. Under sections 7 and 24 the
Senate and the House of Representatives shall be respectively composed of
members 'directly chosen by the people'. Section 128 contains the mechanism
whereby the electors qualified to vote have the ultimate power to alter the
Constitution. As matters developed, voting is compulsory. Whilst one can
point to imperfections, the details of our representative democracy foster,
rather than discourage, pluralism.
Judges under our Constitution are required to deal with conflicts between
states and between states and the Commonwealth, as well as those between
subject and state and subject and subject, and they are required to
interpret the Constitution of an ever-changing nation.
The 'general willingness to yield to the authority of the law courts'
referred to by Dicey is maintained in our system by manifold rules and ideas
designed to ensure the law is never arbitrary, capricious or wholly
unpredictable.
Back to Foucault for a moment. There is no doubt law is a discourse or
construct if not quite in the Foucauldian sense, or at least with the
Foucauldian consequences. It is a practical human institution which is not
aimed at perfectibility and may not even pretend to it. It must also be
conceded that words and concepts familiar to the law, 'the liberty of the
subject', 'equality', 'rights', 'obligations' may change in content and that
statutory semantic language may be ambiguous. The judge's role is often to
determine content in the face of multiple meanings and to select a meaning
for normative purposes.
It should also be conceded that what may be 'true', in the sense of correct
at one time, may change and even be completely reversed as a result of
social change. A simple example is the now inapplicable legal notion that
because a husband and wife were 'one', neither could commit a tort against
the other.
It is also not difficult to think of constitutional cases where a return to
the text and/or a reconsideration of meaning results in overthrowing years
of authority, in circumstances where, for example, those authorities had not
established the certainty expected of the law, Cole v Whitfield and Ha's
case being familiar examples
Nevertheless there are factors in complex equilibrium, which bear on
judging and judicial method. They can be grouped rather artificially as
institutional factors, principles and doctrines, and procedural matters with
considerable overlap between them.
The most important institutional factor is our constitutional arrangements
and the particular distribution of sovereignty and the independence of
judges. Equally important in an institutional sense are the inherited
liberties of the subject against the state – a freedom of speech, freedom
from arbitrary search or detention and freedom from retrospective criminal
legislation.
Related to the independence of judges is the obligation of judicial
neutrality and the need for a judge to declare any bias or conflict of
interest.
Next there is the requirement for judges to carry out their tasks in
public, to hear both sides and to give reasons for judgment which can be
scrutinised and criticised. That exercise of 'reason' is not unlike the
conception of reason I described before: a conception that reasoned argument
can establish truth in the sense of a correct result and persuade readers of
that correctness. The audience for judicial reasons includes the community.
There cannot be any doubt that postmodern theory has drawn attention to the
possible plurality or diversity of community views. Then there are the
appellate structures.
Practicality also always bears on judicial method because a judge's orders
must be obeyed.
Also there are the expectations of the community. No matter how diverse a
community may be in expressing personal autonomy, it requires, as it is
entitled to, complete clarity in the criminal law and reasonable certainty
and predictability in the civil law, including commercial law.
It is also necessary to note the levels of legislative activity in our time
which have enlarged opportunities for the exercise of judicial discretion.
The rules developed to ensure this is done judicially militate against
arbitrary exercise of discretion.
Taking principles and doctrines next: these are of course manifold, but
they include the principles of the criminal law and its standard of proof,
the principles of common law and equity, including all the equitable
doctrines based on the values of good faith and conscience, constantly
refined principles of statutory interpretation and the special principles
and techniques of public law.
Procedural matters include exclusionary rules, privileges and many cognate
strategies, the common rationale of which is identified as 'fairness'.
No justiciable matter, even of striking novelty, is likely to involve a set
of facts about which established law has nothing to say or offer.
The factors I have mentioned all bear on judicial method and encourage
coherence. Decisions which are paradoxical, dependent on personal
virtuosity, or arbitrary are discouraged by that matrix. Our community
understands and accepts change in the law and the authority of final
decisions on novel and difficult matters, even when a tight majority is
involved because of the combination of the factors mentioned.
By comparison, the type of scepticism I have discussed today has its own
nihilistic logic and capacity for a new form of arbitrariness if normative
standards are undermined. That is likely to be resisted in the transnational
jurisprudence of human rights, in balanced law reform or in policy debates
directed to the legislature where the particular type of scepticism
discussed today may provide useful insights and be harnessed constructively.
However if this type of scepticism is to be directed to the exercise of
reason in judicial method or to the public's confidence in the rule of law,
it would need to forge its own greater tolerance for our past and a greater
appreciation of the balances developed in our system over centuries,
designed to counter arbitrary governance.
--
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Submitted by Margo Kingston on June 28, 2007 - 6:03pm.
Margo: Now for something completely different, High Court justice Susan
Crennan delivered this speech today, in Chicago, on some post-modern
theories and how they help "accommodate contested values and policy
considerations" in the law. I bettcha Howard's Aboriginal legislation will
get a run in the High Court. And noone is mentioning the fact that the
Racial Discrimination Act will have to be overriden big time. Declaring
martial law based on race is a big call. Justice Crennan, Australia's only
female Hight Court Justice was appointed in late 2005. Her first speech is
here. Webdiary reported her appointment here.
Scepticism and Judicial Method
In the relevant scholarly literature, scepticism has animated debates over
the relationship between law and morality and the differences between
utilitarian or positivist and reason-based theories of the law. Scepticism
has also haunted the debate over the extent to which judges and judicial
methods can or should accommodate contested values and policy
considerations. These high philosophical themes oblige me to explain
immediately that the aim of this paper is modest. It is to consider briefly
certain cultural theories associated with Continental philosophers such as
Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as they might
interest practising barristers.
I know it would be a mistake to assume French philosophers agree with or
about each other. When Voltaire extravagantly praised the poet and
physiologist von Haller to Casanova, Casanova replied that the admiration
was not mutual. In fact, Casanova said that when he recently spoke to von
Haller, von Haller disparaged Voltaire. After a thoughtful pause Voltaire
replied: 'Perhaps we are both mistaken.'
Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault are all members of the postmodern pantheon.
They are associated with currents of thought responding to political and
social conditions of the modern state, and said to constitute an enabling
ideology for improving those political and social conditions. Broadly
speaking, postmodern thinkers reject established values, grand narrative and
the possibility of objective truth or knowledge. They oppose whatever they
consider to be authoritarian or elitist and they encourage relativism and
pluralism. Such thinking has fuelled some of the debates referred to as the
culture wars.
Those who have most appropriated postmodern ideology in legal circles are
liable to describe themselves simultaneously as 'subversive' and
'progressive', a formulation, or boast, which of itself immediately reflects
the difficulty of seeking radical change in a justice system which has the
confidence of the community.
Insofar as they relate to the law, the culture wars reflect a struggle
between a desire to preserve our justice system as it is because it enforces
normative behaviour, on the one hand, and a quite incompatible desire to be
progressively liberated from those norms, on the other.
Postmodern cultural theories are contrarian and profoundly sceptical. They
are regularly expressed in obdurately opaque language. They have proved
enormously popular and influential in the academy, in Australia, America and
elsewhere, especially in the humanities – in history, literature and
philosophy. .
While the tide has now turned in those fields in the academy, the influence
of such thinking has spread to both legal scholars and legal policy makers.
There is an easily discernible flavour of such thinking in the way in which
contemporary debates are framed over old antinomies between 'justice' and
'law', and between 'strict legalism' (or 'originalism') and 'judicial
activism'. Legal textbooks and casebooks first published this year show and
even acknowledge their indebtedness to postmodern thinking.
Postmodern theories are also explicitly echoed in a more structural
critique of our justice system. It is said that the law is a repressive
construct and that the judges who administer it are part of an elite, or
hegemony, and have understandings of justice and pluralism which are
concomitantly incomplete. Such critiques have had their influence on calls
for a different judiciary and for the transfer or dilution of the
Executive's powers of appointing judges.
Barristers commonly react to postmodern theory with some degree of alarm
and puzzlement, not least because those seeking to implement such theories
in the justice system seem to display deeply paradoxical attitudes. On the
one hand, they sometimes seem barely able to suppress their contempt for the
present state of the law and our legal institutions and have armed
themselves for battle with a strong belief in the transformative powers of a
coercive bundle of social strategies known as political correctness. Yet on
the other hand, they accept that the rule of law is central to our liberal
democracy.
It is not my purpose to attempt any comprehensive critique of the theories
I have mentioned. Nor do I suggest that there is anything wrong with
challenges, even most radical and profound challenges, to our social
institutions, or with profound questioning of our legal sanctions or the
working assumptions behind them. That is one of the freedoms of living in a
modern liberal democracy. What I would like to consider is some of the fine
detail of the scepticism, that of Foucault in particular, and to consider
that particular type of scepticism in the context of judicial method.
It would not be possible to do proper justice to the range, the subtleties
and the nuances of postmodern thinking in the space of a short paper and I
refer to Lyotard and Derrida no more that is necessary for the purposes of
mentioning pervasive concepts associated with their names.
Jean-François Lyotard (1928-1998) is best known to English speakers for his
work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. One of Lyotard's best
known ideas is that accounts of human history consist of 'grand' or 'meta'
narratives which, while focussing on events, at the same time suppress
alternative versions of such events. The version of events suppressed is
identified as the version which could be told by those in some sort of
subordinate relationship to the cultural mainstream.
That idea has resonances in the practice of history. For example, EP
Thompson in his preface to The Making of The English Working Class states
that he is writing the history of the 'lacemakers' and others, the figures
normally effaced in historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution, in
order to rescue them from what he calls 'the enormous condescension of
posterity.' In Australia, the search for, and the presentation of,
alternative narratives has most notably been found in an expansion of
studies of indigenous history and women's history.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is perhaps most famous in the English speaking
world for a process of reading, or a philosophical strategy, which he calls
deconstruction and which bears on the relationship between thought and
language. Stated simply, Derrida questions the assumption that a word and
the object it designates are the same, or that a word and an action it
describes are the same. Words for Derrida not only have numerous meanings,
but also those multiple meanings are often themselves contradictory. Once
that premise of linguistic ambiguity is accepted, it follows, so the
argument goes, that a multiplicity of interpretations of any text, or any
historical event is possible, if not inescapable.
Legal thinkers and historians have long recognised, of course, that the
search for a definitive interpretation of complex historical events eludes
success. Sir Owen Dixon noted this in the context of of his own times in
Concerning Judicial Method, the speech delivered at Yale in 1955. He said of
the then practice of history: 'History concedes the validity of a diversity
of subjective interpretations.'
Following the idea of deconstruction, Derrida also coined the word
'differance' to express the idea of the multiple (even unfinished) meanings
in any text. If one were taxed with expressing the essence of postmodern
thought in its civil application in a single sentence it might run like
this: 'postmodernism suggests that civil communities and the political and
legal institutions which govern those communities should develop and
implement a much greater tolerance of difference, ie diversity, among
community members.' It does not follow that administrative action jusitified
by some mantra derived from such a formula will necessarily have the
propounded effect, nor that the purpose will be precisely as claimed, no
more than that a republic founded on Virtue will necessariy be virtuous.
History, or experience, enforces a quite different conclusion.
Central to the thinking of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), to whom I now turn,
was the idea that social and political institutions, and particularly the
law, were mechanisms by which elites, or what he styled hegemonies,
exercised power through mechanisms of coercion and regulation. He is known
for his historical investigations into what he terms discourses. For him, a
discourse is a field of both specialised knowledge and practices, by
reference to which power is exercised. Power and knowledge for him are one
and the same. He was not the first to observe the connection, although he
perhaps inverted what Bacon expressed in his aphorism: scientia potentia
est. Of course, the two men attached very different value to scientia.
Foucault's most challenging ideas in relation to the law are: (1) the idea
that a person is a rational individual is a figment of Enlightenment
thinking; (2) the idea that truth is relative – that is, 'truth' is truth
for someone or some group, but it is never objective in the empirical sense;
and (3) his idea that legal prohibitions on certain human conduct,
particularly sexual conduct, reflected nothing more complicated than a
repressive assertion of majoritarian views. As one critic said of postmodern
theories generally, 'what is under assault here is the normative'.
I heard recently of a patient shocked by his surgeon's boast that he was a
postmodernist. When the patient nervously queried the impact of these
beliefs on his professional life the surgeon said: 'No need to worry. Truth
is relative but medical science is accurate enough for practical purposes.'
Although I touch on each of the three ideas of Foucault mentioned, let me
concentrate for a minute on 'truth' and judicial method. When Sir Owen Dixon
made reference to Pilate's question: 'What is truth?', he noted that Pilate
did not wait for an answer because he was 'about to leave the judgment
hall.' Here, and elsewhere, Sir Owen Dixon was emphasising that those 'in
the judgment hall', judges under a duty to judge, are required to establish
truth or, putting it another way, reach a correct result.
Foucault frankly acknowledged Nietzsche's influence on his views of the
relativity of truth. Nietzsche's answer to Pilate's question 'What is
truth?' was as follows: 'A mobile host of metaphors, metonymies and
anthromorphisms ... Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions.' That conception of truth cannot easily be reconciled with a
judge's sworn duty to 'do justice according to law', which is predicated
upon findings of by the trier of fact about the truth of past events.
However, a sceptical attitude to truth encourages some reconsideration of
the institutional and other limitations on judging, a topic to which I will
return.
Before going any further, in a work just as influential as the works of the
Continental philosophers I have mentioned, Karl Popper in The Logic of
Scientific Discovery (1959) argued that no scientific hypothesis could be
proven to be absolutely true. And Albert Einstein is most remembered for his
theory of relativity in relation to time and space. Suggestive as the
analogies might appear, however, it might come as a surprise to Popper or
Einstein, or Heisenberg, Shrödinger or Plack, for that matter, to find
Foucoult nominated as their spiritual heir.
In any event, let me allow Foucault to speak for himself.
Foucault on the Enlightenment
In Truth and Method, Part 1, Foucault said the Enlightenment 'has
determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do
today.' He refers to Kant's description of the Enlightenment 'as the moment
when humanity is going to put its own reason to use...' He thinks of the
Enlightenment 'as a set of political, economic, social, institutional and
cultural events on which we still depend' which propounded the tradition of
rationalism as a means of ordering human affairs.
Foucault on Sovereignty
Foucault explains that his reaction against unquestioning acceptance of
values traditionally associated with the Enlightenment, specifically
humanism and rationalism, is an attempt by him to recalibrate what is and
what is not 'indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous
subjects.'
Hence his interest in all forms of sovereignty or authority over others
including the law. His historical studies of 'power/knowledge' in
psychiatric institutions and prisons were intended to explicate the
political and economic structures of modern society and to challenge the
traditional view that reason explains the framework of the law.
Power/knowledge is a key Foucauldian epistemological concept set up in
radical opposition to any reconciliations of human instinct and culture, for
example through science or law.
He said he wanted to study the 'problem of power' because '... [o]n the
right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, etc that is,
in juridicial terms; on the Marxist side, it was posed only in terms of the
state apparatus.' He inverted Clausewitz's formula to: 'politics is the
continuation of war by other means.'
In 'The Carceral', the final section of Discipline and Punish (first
published in 1975), Foucault explains his theory that the institution of the
law, as it has developed in modern society, goes further than merely
criminalising offences which are attacks on the common interest. In other
words law, as an institution, reaches far beyond the social contractarian
theories of Hobbes, of Locke (and of Rousseau). Foucault asserts that the
institutions which replaced the sovereign's power which he identifies as
'the school, the court, the asylum and the prison' penalise 'departure from
the norm' rather than penalising behaviour which really threatens the
autonomy of members of the community.
This is his main complaint about social and political arrangements of
modern nation states, including liberal democracies such as our own. He
perceives the law, at least in part, as an instrument of repressive social
cohesion because it insufficiently tolerates ways of living, ie expressions
of human autonomy, which pose no genuine threat to civil peace or the good
of other members of the community.
Foucault on Truth
Foucault says 'Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics"
of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes
function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to
distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is
sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition
of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as
true.'
He emphasised when referring to truth he was not referring to facts to be
discovered and accepted, as in science; rather he said he was speaking about
'truth' as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation,
distribution, circulation and operation of statements.' He described his
intellectual enterprise as being about 'detaching the power of truth from
the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it
operates at the present time', law being in his view a form or expression of
hegemony.
Foucault on Repression
Foucault considers repression to be 'emblematic of what we call bourgeois
societies.' For him, disciplinary power was an invention of bourgeois
society designed to maintain community cohesion.
On that note and against that background, Foucault's last and unfinished
work, The History of Sexuality, Part 1 (first published in 1976) contains a
revealing anecdote. It is about a feeble-minded peasant in Lorraine in 1867
who engages in sexual behaviour with a child. The peasant was then reported,
led by the gendarmes to a judge, who turned him over to a doctor. Foucault
objects to what he would call the 'legalising' and 'medicalising' of the
peasant's behaviour. Human actions we would describe as 'indecent dealing
with a child', and criminal in a person of sound mind, and as meriting some
social and legal sanction and prevention, are described by Foucault as
'inconsequential bucolic pleasures' and as 'barely furtive pleasures between
simple-minded adults and alert children.'
Foucault recounts this anecdote to draw attention to what he regards as the
arbitrariness of definitions framed to describe human behaviour, and the
contingent nature of meaning or truth. This point is repeated in many places
and under many guises throughout his oeuvre. He rejects our culture's long
tradition of belief in objective truths, and the law's use of reason to
establish truth, since 'truths' for him are fashioned by whatever is the
dominant group paradigm or discourse.
Foucault's criticisms of the law, at least in this last work, seem little
more than heuristic devices because he shows no interest in the child in the
anecdote I have described; he is only interested in what happened to the
peasant. He ignores the possibility that categorising human behaviours as
'good' or 'bad', 'permitted' or 'forbidden', can reflect a genuine consensus
of a diverse community rather than some form of repression by a dominant
group. That a community requires protection for its members against certain
behaviours, the prohibition of which is an institutional norm, is an
extremely unremarkable way to organise a complex civil society. Few judges
would think that Foucault got the balance right between the autonomy of the
peasant and the rights of the child.
There is a considerable body of distinguished work in which scholars probe
Foucault's idea that community standards, reflected in legal standards, need
to be reconsidered and reshaped so as to accommodate greater variations in
human behaviour and to reflect greater toleration of different expresssions
of human autonomy.
But, rather than move in that direction, I want to go back for a moment to
think about the charge that our legal institutions reflect and implement
arbitrary governance. To do this involves reflecting on what 'sovereignty'
really means in Australian constitutional history and, before that, English
constitutional history. Sovereignty, that is the power to command others, is
an idea which can no longer be wholly disentangled from the protean concepts
of liberty and equality.
The Army Debates, sometimes referred to as the Puritan or Putney debates,
which commenced in the autumn of 1647 are extremely valuable in revealing
the close detail in political currents in Puritan thought before the Act of
Settlement 1701. First, the one point on which the victors of the First
Civil War were agreed was the need to ensure that any restored King would
need to be bound so as never again to exercise absolute or arbitrary
sovereignty.
Secondly, one of the four groups in the Debates, the Levellers, supported
the idea of manhood suffrage, an idea which never completely left the
English political stage once it had been determined that the sovereignty of
the King was to be shared in some way. Admittedly, it did not come into its
own until the 19th century.
Thirdly, all parties to the Debates had an egalitarian concept of reason.
Reason was thought of as common to all, independent of education. This
underpinned the ardent contemporary belief in free speech – the humblest
person was just as entitled to be convinced or to convince another in
relation to an idea. Debate was thought of as a constructive method for
establishing the truth.
Over 40 years later, James II having left the Kingdom, in the Convention
Parliament of 28 January 1689, Sergeant Maynard asserted '... our government
is mixed, not monarchical and tyrranous, but has had its beginnings from the
people.' Sir Robert Howard said 'The constitution of the government is
actually grounded upon pact and covenant with the people.' Sir Robert Sawyer
observed 'The government is all unto the people, which people we are ...'
Then after the vote to declare the Throne vacant was taken, the House of
Lords was concerned to 'declare the constitution and the rule of
government.'
The Bill of Rights 1689 asserted 'the right of free speech' and provided
that parliaments ought to be held frequently for 'the amending,
strengthening and preserving of the laws.'
These manoeuvres were preliminary to installing a new sovereign on the
basis that 'laws and liberties' were to be preserved. It was recognised by
Parliament that in asserting its own sovereignty it would be necessary to
detach the judiciary from the absolute and arbitrary sovereignty of the
King. Judges, who up until the Constitutional Settlement had been appointed
and removed by the King, were often servile to his wishes. Under the Act of
Settlement 1701 judges were appointed for the first time as independent
judges in terms which remain familiar in our own polity.
Whilst the Constitutional Settlement was not, in terms consonant with
modern understanding of these terms, either liberal or democratic (and it
reflected religious dogma), it nevertheless institutionalised representative
government and divided sovereignty.
Through representative government and the placing of the laws and nominated
liberties in the hands of independent judges, sovereignty in the sense of
power over others became the opposite of absolute and arbitrary. It became
limited and predictable.
Personal liberty involved a freedom to act, including in relation to
property, and a freedom to speak, in any way not prohibited by the law.
Criminal laws could only be prospective. Equality meant everyone was equally
bound and protected by the law, although it did not mean political equality.
The independence of the judiciary existed to protect the community from
arbitrary command.
Blackstone, writing later in the 18th century, not only recognised that the
Constitutional Settlement divided sovereignty between the King, the Lords
and the Commoners, he also considered that the electors who returned members
in the House of Commons exercised sovereignty.
The extent to which the relationship between the subject and the state
thereafter rested on the positive authority of the common law and the
independent judges is well illustrated in a series of cases concerning
general warrants for searching premises. In 1765, Lord Camden was wholly
unimpressed with the arbitrariness of general warrants which for some 80
years after the Settlement had been issued by the executive through the
Secretary of State. He asserted that if the power to issue general warrants
was not to be found 'in our books', ie in common law precedents, it did not
exist. In Wilkes v Wood he instructed a jury that a warrant which did not
identify a particular object of a search was 'totally subversive of the
liberty of the subject.'
In the same context, Blackstone said when speaking judicially 'Every man's
house is his castle'. Pitt the Elder addressed Parliament the following year
in more fulsome terms but to the same effect. These developments resulted in
the enduring rule that warrants and applications for them should be properly
particularised mentioned by Judge Posner in the context of terrorism.
The differing techniques of common law and equity, one looking to precedent
and operating analogically, and the other looking to doctrines intended to
be comprehensive enough to cover novel circumstances, operated together to
avoid arbitrary, ie capricious or unjust, results flowing from conflicting
desires for certainty and flexibility.
What is my point in reaching back in time instead of looking forward in the
context of the particular brand of contemporary scepticism under discussion?
It is this: the unwinding of sovereignty in English constitutional history
and the contemporary ideas of liberty and equality associated with that
particular political development involved the institution of an independent
judiciary to resist arbitrariness in the behaviour of the Crown or
Parliament or the Executive and the differing techniques of common law and
equity were directed to balancing certainty, predictability and flexibility.
When the detail of those developments is considered it does not seem just
to assert that the common law developed as an institution, encouraging
arbitrary command over subjects or as a discipline inimical to pluralism.
The freedoms most essential to pluralism were forged and maintained by a
community and a judiciary set against arbitrariness.
Let me 'fast forward' from the institution of representative government and
the diffusion of sovereignty in late 17th-century England to the forging of
political institutions and government in the mid 19th century in the
Australian colonies and let me take my home State, Victoria, as an example.
Gold was discovered in Victoria on 8 August 1851. The Separation Act from
New South Wales had been in force a mere five weeks. These were the
circumstances of a massive migration to Australia where political structures
as we know them now were in their infancy (as was social infrastructure as
shown by any of the familiar paintings of the time). The centrality of the
gold rushes to nation building is a familiar and popular topic with
Australian historians, not least because the social and economic
circumstances in which 'Jack was as good as his master' led quickly and
inexorably to a demand for a theoretically classless society, to be
expressed by the political equivalent, suffrage without property
qualifications.
The nexus between owning property and being entitled to vote was broken
once itinerant miners had a franchise based on holding a mining licence.
Whilst it is true that upper houses in various colonies, later states,
retained property qualifications, egalitarian theory included at the time
not only equality before the law but also political equality. Despite the
gap between the ideal and the reality, which exists with every ideal,
egalitarian theory suffused public consciousness in Australia prior to
Federation.
On the other hand, 'liberty' and 'equality' had been redefined for the
French in 1789 followed by a very different transition from a monarch with
absolute sovereignty to republican political and legal institutions.
That leads to a twofold caution: first against assuming Foucault's ideas
about the unwinding of sovereignty in France can be transposed, and stand as
accurate analyses of the development of the rule of law in common law
countries, especially our own; secondly, against forgetting the long history
of major liberties such as free speech and freedom from arbitrary search and
detention, which are central to, and protective of pluralism.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth emerged against the colonial
background I have sketched. Sovereignty, in the sense of the power to
command others, is distributed through the separation of powers between the
legislature, the executive and the judicature. Under sections 7 and 24 the
Senate and the House of Representatives shall be respectively composed of
members 'directly chosen by the people'. Section 128 contains the mechanism
whereby the electors qualified to vote have the ultimate power to alter the
Constitution. As matters developed, voting is compulsory. Whilst one can
point to imperfections, the details of our representative democracy foster,
rather than discourage, pluralism.
Judges under our Constitution are required to deal with conflicts between
states and between states and the Commonwealth, as well as those between
subject and state and subject and subject, and they are required to
interpret the Constitution of an ever-changing nation.
The 'general willingness to yield to the authority of the law courts'
referred to by Dicey is maintained in our system by manifold rules and ideas
designed to ensure the law is never arbitrary, capricious or wholly
unpredictable.
Back to Foucault for a moment. There is no doubt law is a discourse or
construct if not quite in the Foucauldian sense, or at least with the
Foucauldian consequences. It is a practical human institution which is not
aimed at perfectibility and may not even pretend to it. It must also be
conceded that words and concepts familiar to the law, 'the liberty of the
subject', 'equality', 'rights', 'obligations' may change in content and that
statutory semantic language may be ambiguous. The judge's role is often to
determine content in the face of multiple meanings and to select a meaning
for normative purposes.
It should also be conceded that what may be 'true', in the sense of correct
at one time, may change and even be completely reversed as a result of
social change. A simple example is the now inapplicable legal notion that
because a husband and wife were 'one', neither could commit a tort against
the other.
It is also not difficult to think of constitutional cases where a return to
the text and/or a reconsideration of meaning results in overthrowing years
of authority, in circumstances where, for example, those authorities had not
established the certainty expected of the law, Cole v Whitfield and Ha's
case being familiar examples
Nevertheless there are factors in complex equilibrium, which bear on
judging and judicial method. They can be grouped rather artificially as
institutional factors, principles and doctrines, and procedural matters with
considerable overlap between them.
The most important institutional factor is our constitutional arrangements
and the particular distribution of sovereignty and the independence of
judges. Equally important in an institutional sense are the inherited
liberties of the subject against the state – a freedom of speech, freedom
from arbitrary search or detention and freedom from retrospective criminal
legislation.
Related to the independence of judges is the obligation of judicial
neutrality and the need for a judge to declare any bias or conflict of
interest.
Next there is the requirement for judges to carry out their tasks in
public, to hear both sides and to give reasons for judgment which can be
scrutinised and criticised. That exercise of 'reason' is not unlike the
conception of reason I described before: a conception that reasoned argument
can establish truth in the sense of a correct result and persuade readers of
that correctness. The audience for judicial reasons includes the community.
There cannot be any doubt that postmodern theory has drawn attention to the
possible plurality or diversity of community views. Then there are the
appellate structures.
Practicality also always bears on judicial method because a judge's orders
must be obeyed.
Also there are the expectations of the community. No matter how diverse a
community may be in expressing personal autonomy, it requires, as it is
entitled to, complete clarity in the criminal law and reasonable certainty
and predictability in the civil law, including commercial law.
It is also necessary to note the levels of legislative activity in our time
which have enlarged opportunities for the exercise of judicial discretion.
The rules developed to ensure this is done judicially militate against
arbitrary exercise of discretion.
Taking principles and doctrines next: these are of course manifold, but
they include the principles of the criminal law and its standard of proof,
the principles of common law and equity, including all the equitable
doctrines based on the values of good faith and conscience, constantly
refined principles of statutory interpretation and the special principles
and techniques of public law.
Procedural matters include exclusionary rules, privileges and many cognate
strategies, the common rationale of which is identified as 'fairness'.
No justiciable matter, even of striking novelty, is likely to involve a set
of facts about which established law has nothing to say or offer.
The factors I have mentioned all bear on judicial method and encourage
coherence. Decisions which are paradoxical, dependent on personal
virtuosity, or arbitrary are discouraged by that matrix. Our community
understands and accepts change in the law and the authority of final
decisions on novel and difficult matters, even when a tight majority is
involved because of the combination of the factors mentioned.
By comparison, the type of scepticism I have discussed today has its own
nihilistic logic and capacity for a new form of arbitrariness if normative
standards are undermined. That is likely to be resisted in the transnational
jurisprudence of human rights, in balanced law reform or in policy debates
directed to the legislature where the particular type of scepticism
discussed today may provide useful insights and be harnessed constructively.
However if this type of scepticism is to be directed to the exercise of
reason in judicial method or to the public's confidence in the rule of law,
it would need to forge its own greater tolerance for our past and a greater
appreciation of the balances developed in our system over centuries,
designed to counter arbitrary governance.
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