From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, September 10
Al Jazeera — read the full story
The courthouse doors close at noon — ... not from decree... but from the fracture itself. Brazil's Supreme Court has suspended operations after one justice faced accusations of banking scandal involvement, and now the justices are trading accusations among themselves. The whole thing exposes how quickly institutional credibility collapses when the people meant to guard it start turning on each other. Benjamin Franklin has the first word today, then Marcus Aurelius.
A court that suspends itself because one judge has been caught with his fingers in the till , you have seen the like before, though the latitude differs. In '68 Hutchinson wrote me from Boston that the grand jury would have presented a libel... but the attorney-general stayed away and Otis's creatures turned the panel; the chief justice sat helpless while the law became a plaything. The mechanism is always the same: the institution decides its own survival matters more than the offense, and the public learns that justice is whatever the current majority says it is.
We in Philadelphia watched the proprietary party dissolve the assembly rather than face a money bill they could not amend , the Irish parliament, Franklin noted in the margin of a pamphlet, may throw out money bills, and the defect in theory is great... yet the inconvenience in practice has been small. Until it is not. The Dutch deputies at The Hague in '78 required unanimity for a convoy; Amsterdam protested, the rest voted, and Sir Joseph Yorke rode to London with news of a triumph that emptied the treasury.
A rule designed to protect liberty becomes the instrument of its paralysis. You who keep a ledger know this: when the bookkeeper audits himself, the entries balance. The Brazilian court has not merely paused; it has confessed that its own legitimacy is now a contested account. A constitution that cannot try its own judges tries nothing at all.
This letter carries on the story begun in Cooper’s earlier one above, August 15, of the collapse of royal authority in Massachusetts. But, as with his description of the crisis that culminated in the Tea Party, the chronology is confused; and in the confusion the principal develo…
<The Hague, November 20, 1778, in French: Returning here, I learned from our friend that the Provincial Assembly by majority vote has resolved against providing convoys and in favor of the Admiralty’s advisory. Amsterdam has inserted a formal protest, which it demands be publishe…
released by the insolvent act, and our money, both principal, interest and expences irrecoverably gone. Is not our case grievous? We have in actions founded upon notes of hand, been cast in their courts of judicature. We have appeal’d to his Majesty in council for redress, got th…
of. Nay it is possible that This Power in the American Assemblies has never been found inconvenient. such a power may never be found productive of any great inconvenience.” The Irish parliament, for instance, may throw out money bills: here “is a Very true. Then let us [not] trou…
In this state of things there was no security but quitting my posts, which nothing but the last extremity would justify. As chief justice for two years after our first disorders I kept the grand juries tollerably well to their duty. The last spring there had been several riots, a…
You watched the court at Carnuntum dissolve the same way. The legate accused the tribune of selling grain contracts; the tribune produced letters showing the legate's seal on the same contracts. Neither would step aside. The tribunal sat empty for forty days while the Quadi massed across the river. Justice did not wait , it migrated to the camp prefect's tent, where a centurion decided disputes with a vine-staff and no appeal. The shape is always this: when those who hold the law become the law's first offenders, the law does not vanish. It flees.
It settles in the hands of men who never swore the oath. The banking scandal is not the disease; it is the symptom that made the disease visible. Mutual accusation is the shield each justice raises against his own exposure. The court suspends itself to protect the accused from each other , and in doing so, surrenders the only thing that made it a court. You saw this at Aquileia during the fever. The physicians fled. The slaves tended the dying.
Authority followed competence, not title. The same will happen here. The vacuum is already filling. Marcus: do not mistake institutional silence for stability. Name the migration. Track where the judgments actually go. That is the only ledger that matters.
subject of a judicial inquiry can be distinctly defined, and cannot afford unlimited licence to the judge; wherefore a good cause is in a better position if it before a judge than before an arbitrator, because the words of the law tie down a judge and define certain limits beyond…
certainly sufficient reason for their greatly disturbed minds. The large hotels in Chihuahua were fairly groaning under the burden of caring for such a great number of people which increased in number each day, all of whom were flocking to the city with the same object in view: T…
Mexico.” “Our power—I mean the power of the Church, as wielded in the nineteenth-century Mexico, is only known by reading history,” said Mr. Martinez. “I see where you are correct, my friends. The relations must be severed. The civil law must be revised. It is sad, sad, sad to se…
that was the opinion of the public, but _he_ knew that his success was due to his knowledge of the “great powers that be.” The case in hand was to him a supreme moment, for by special legislation it came under his jurisdiction. It was generally known that President Mortingo belie…
what the law may be among you Stoic philosophers in such a case. I suppose that you keep the action which I bring against another distinct from that which he Strings against me, and the two processes are not merged into one? For instance, if a man entrusts me with money, and afte…
Al Jazeera carried the story. When a court suspends itself over a judge's scandal, the real question isn't the individual misconduct — it's whether the institution can still credibly police its own members. That's Old News for today.