According to the book some judges are elected in partisan elections. This means that the judges are aligned with a particular party and are accordingly elected on their alliance. This seems to defeat the point of impartiality when the judges are elected on their biases. This also seems to be an issue with the Supreme Court. The president, a politician, selects a candidate that benefits his political position. Mostly that means he selects a judge that is aligned with his political party inorder to gain more influence in the court for his political party. If there have been several presidents who were conservative and they had chances to select Supreme Court justices during their terms the Supreme Court would be an overwhelming effect. The effect would consist of a mostly conservative Supreme Court which might not be impartial. An example is that justice Alito is an extreme conservative and some of his comments lead one to believe that he has negative opinions about women. It is also interesting that about half the population is female and only two justices out of nine on the Supreme Court are women.
Humans by definition are not perfect. Judges are human and therefore cannot be expected to be completely impartial in their judgments or opinions. The fact that some are elected by political means just amplifies the division between impartiality and bias.
These are some judge political cartoons.
http://www.committeeforjustice.org/blog/uploaded_images/Fiesta-Cartoon-790746.jpg
http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/s/k/2/Judge-Sotomayor.jpg
http://www.stus.com/images/products/cla173z.gif
http://www.mchumor.com/00images/2993_judge_cartoon.gif
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_1AuBdimNSBkzg91ItIn4qZC6G2Fd3dkrU_n2u91HqpjUqJe1MpOLQFqWCcdRMvI3kB5f-F4D6XIMROpTp4QZLI7q6ih8bo0w5n12H-ZlzuCTfWEJP8J_05-hwhdJsfAeHPkiWA3pshY/s400/1reached_retirement_age_judge_335845.jpg
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Good job. Good reflection. Still need some work on your writing. "accordingly elected?" or "inorder" instead of "in order". Sentence structure needs work, too. It doesn't flow well.
ReplyDeleteI like the "reactions" part! Something to think about is to embed those cartoons right in your blog. That would be a nice feature for the design grade.