Adversary jurisprudence. (The survival of culture: IX).

The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by law.

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every law or rule of conduct must, whether its author perceives the fact or not, lay down or rest upon some general principle, and must therefore, if it succeeds in attaining its end, commend the principle to public attention and imitation and thus affect legislative opinion.

--A. V. Dicey

The nightmare of the American intellectual is that the control of public policy should fall into the hands of the American people.... [P]olicymaking by the justices of the Supreme Court, intellectuals all, in the name of the Constitution, is the only way in which this can be prevented.

--Lino Graglia

Until recently, the name of Charles Pickering was hardly a household word. That changed the moment President Bush nominated the obscure federal trial judge for a seat on a court of appeals. Overnight, Judge Pickering became the latest casualty of the cultural wars. If there was no compelling reason that Pickering should have been elevated to an appeals court, there was certainly no good reason why he should not have been. Candidates no better qualified have in the past been routinely confirmed by the Senate. He was not. Instead, in a scenario that has become depressingly familiar, he was vilified by the media and anti-Bush partisans. His candidacy was scuffled by a party-line vote in the Judiciary Committee, which denied him consideration by the full Senate where he probably would have been confirmed.