Litigation

Souter: ?Fair Reading? of Constitution not Realistic

By Peter Hardin

Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter stood up in a commencement speech at Harvard for justices whose interpretation of the Constitution leads them to identify rights that it doesn’t mention explicitly.

The Constitution has “a lot of general language in order to be useful over long stretches of time,?? Justice Souter said, and it ?contains values that may well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony.??

Some people describe deciding a constitutional case as involving a straightforward “fair reading” of the Constitution’s words, but that is not so realistic, he said.

?The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another,?? he was quoted by the Boston Globe as saying.

A complete text of Justice Souter’s remarks is available from the Harvard Gazette.

Full post as published by The Gavel on May 28, 2010 (boomark / email).