slow blogging, because i'm writing furiously on a children's book about a school revolution (spyder's rebellion) and final revision of political aesthetics (cornell 2010!). but here's an oped- piece.

People Without Personhood
By Crispin Sartwell

The California Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor happened to come on the same day. And they happened to come with the same rhetoric. The majority opinion in the marriage case, authored by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, asserted - perhaps apologetically - that the role of the court "is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values."
    Meanwhile, obviously speaking from more or less a common email, a number of Republican senators used words like unto these by John Cornyn on the Sotomayor nomination: "She must prove her commitment to impartially deciding cases based on the law, rather than based on her own personal politics, feelings, and preferences." Indeed, Obama, in introducing Sotomayor, said much the same, before going on to describe her inspiring particular life story.
    These are the merest cliches regarding the rule of law in its great majesty. But I propose to you that you know them to be merely false. Or not merely false, but impossible and contradictory.
     What, exactly, is the procedure supposed to be for transcending your own point of view? When, for example, you read a law and decide what it means, who is doing this reading and deciding? Everyone? No one? Or is the law reading and interpreting itself? Perhaps we should eliminate the human beings from the legal system entirely.
    It's a fundamental human dilemma that we inescapably have a certain point of view, a certain subjectivity, compounded of emotions, histories, opinions, biochemical processes. Much as we might like to, we cannot escape this irremediable condition by wishing it weren't so, or by an arduous process of education in which we're saturated to other human subjectivities - professors, scholars, judges - and their products.
    It would be nice to be little gods, or abstract objects like the number seven or the concept of justice. Then we wouldn't have to suffer or age in time, or be responsible for anything that actually happens. But, um, that's not one of the options.
     Insofar as American jurisprudence rests on the fundamental principle that my opinions are nobody's opinions in particular, or that I have no actual beliefs, or that the voice coming out of my mouth is the voice of an abstract object, it rests - obviously - on a contradiction and a delusion.
     We might say that American jurisprudence of this variety is a cloud of mystification, or perhaps we should just gently point out that it is complete and obvious balderdash.
    Now there are various reasons to emit this jive. One is that it increases the prestige of the legal profession. Indeed, to the extent that people take it seriously, it increases the prestige of the legal profession well beyond belief, makes judges trans-human.
    It also relieves them of any personal responsibility for the concrete results of their decisions, since it was not the person - which, we may be sure, has things likes beliefs and emotions - that rendered the decision, but something speaking through them, a pure spirit they were trance-channeling.
    This has led to the amazing spectacle of a Supreme Court in which the opinions and rulings of a Scalia, say, are completely predictable from his emotional set-up and belief system, but in which this is disavowed at every moment, a kind of law based wholly on non-stop dishonesty.
    We're going to have to make due with this, at the very best: I try, from my actual limited human point of view, to know as much law as I can, interpret it plausibly, and to rule fairly on its application to specific circumstances. Someone who actually succeeds at doing that is as good a judge as creatures such as ourselves can possibly be.
     If inculcating respect for the law requires more than that - if it requires that the person in the robe is not a person at all but a concept or a little god - then we're just going to have to do without.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.