Quote of the Day
We don’t have a Justice System, we have a Legal System, the purpose of which is to (supposedly) apply the law fairly to all in a predictable manner.
But even that’s gone by the wayside. The fact of the matter is that it appears that those in the system are interested in getting convictions, not in serving justice.
Found via David Codrea, here’s today’s QotD:
I have long been troubled by the uneven rules among circuits governing the use of unpublished decisions. It made a very irregular and unjust usage. Depending on where you lived, the precedent applicable would vary. Even worse, many courts in circuits which had rules prohibiting citation of unpublished decisions regularly used them for precedent in their own decisions. It made the principles underlying stare decisis unworkable. You should be able to know ahead of time what law will apply to the case you are researching. Use of unpublished opinions in some decisions and not in others, also raised the decision-making of courts to a level of secrecy and unpredictability that may have abridged constitutionality. – Out of the Jungle: “Done” Scotus: On using unpublished opinions
(Bold emphasis mine. Italics in original.) RTWT.