Few Americans, however, realize, any more, on what judicial dispensations in particular matters in controversy are normally based, other than equally idealized notions of impartial constitutions, statutes, and case law.
In an earlier time, party bosses were more widely known by the common man to manipulate judicial decisions, routinely.
Where judges have to run for office, in many states, or seek political party appointment approval in the rest, seldom does this judge- as- politician background to their obtaining and keeping their judicial position not figure in some way in their calculations regarding their rulings on particular matters in controversy which might come before them.
Juries are enjoined with apparent equanimity to ignore anything a jurist might have said or done to make a juror suspect that he or she preferred one verdict over another.
The juror will not have seen or heard potentially politically motivated and biased rulings of law, nevertheless often resting on some defensible line of support in the normally conveniently conflicting, unreconciled, and irreconcilable smorgasbord of specialized case and statute law precedent in most states, rulings in chambers or at the bench out of the jury's hearing.
What one might call controlling precedent, a vestige of jurisprudence from a bygone age of jurisprudential rectitude, no longer clearly operates in most areas of the actual practice of law, assuming indeed for a moment that it ever actually did. Federal practice is still ostensibly much more guided by the concept, but with discrepancies among federal districts, there is still room for manoeuvre.
The political and structural causes, for failures of the rule of law, as most Americans understand the idealized concept, are legion.
See, by way of example, Judge Knox' observations, Fla. B. J., "Joint Panel Embraces Mentoring", May 1, 2008. Similar situations, regarding the exigencies of judicial politics, no doubt exist in every state.
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