forwarded from Jeet

Charles Brown CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Jan 17 13:39:18 PST 2002


forwarded from Jeet

Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> Subject:

^^^^^^^

CB: The bourgeoisie will not stop being judicially active because the left and working class stop activism through the courts. So, the left must remain active through the courts in self defense.

Also, I find that most who oppose judicial activism or legal activism, usually have some program that ultimately depends upon laws in some way. Few leftists, except consistent anarchists, conceive of long term , widespread vigilantism as their program. How would the movement's gains be maintained without a platform for laws ? Don't laws imply courts ? This seems a big gap in all non-anarchist, left , anti-judicial theories.

Are Nathan or others proposing abolition of the rule of law ?

Lets put it another way. We win the Civil War, a form of non-judicial activism. What do we do then ? Not make the abolition of slavery a law in the 13th Amendment ? Not make equal protection the law in the 14th Amendment ? Once you make them laws, what do you do ? Not seek to enforce the laws in courts ?

Lets say we win the union at GM in 1936 ? What do we do, just continue to depend on sitdown strikes to defend our victory ?

What's the non-legal activist long term program and strategy ?

^^^^^^^^

Doug,

I don't think reactionaries have just used the courts to block political

reforms. Rather, there is a tradition of conservative judicial activism which has been rather creative in using the law to enforce ruling class ideas. Think of the way a decision like Plessy Vs. Ferguson conjured out of nothing the idea of "seperate but equal" as a rationale for Jim Crow. (As I understand it, Jim Crow was itself a novel phenonomeon in the 1870s and 1880s). Another example would be how conservative justice applied the 14th

amendment to protect corporations, despite the fact that this goes against

the "original intent" of the law. My point is that liberals and leftist don't need to masochistically berate themselves for judicial activism, when in fact the larger history of the U.S. is that the law is usually on the side of the ruling class.

Jeet



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