Shownotes Transcript
It is somewhat ironic, as the new Supreme Court Justice Jackson is being sworn in, I marvel that so few Americans know of the previous Justice Jackson of the Supreme Court. He was one of the more brilliant and insightful, and truly judicious individuals to have served in that capacity - Justice Robert H. Jackson.
Justice Robert H. Jackson is the only individual to have served in all three of the highest levels of American Jurisprudence. He served as Solicitor General of United States, Attorney General of the United States, as Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and would have served as Chief Justice, but the political nature of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration and its positioning of the Court, precluded that final honor. Finally, at least to my thinking, Justice Jackson’s single, greatest and most important position was his appointment to, as well as insistence on serving as, the chief American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials.
These trials underscored a basic principle of law and justice - that there is a higher law.
Without recognizing the existence of a higher authority, a higher law, to which all earthly or posited laws must be compared, there can be no question of justice or injustice. There is only the raw use of position in power. “If I have the authority, then that entitles me to make any law I wish.”
But, if that proposed, our posited law of “power” is in any way inequitable, we declare it deficient. It literally is an ‘unjust law.’ And that is for a very simple reason - there is indeed a higher law, a true justice, reflected in the orderly universe in which we live.
Justice Robert H. Jackson is frequently quoted not merely from his decisions, but often from his dissents, which were not fully understood at the time. Justice Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice to have never graduated from a law school! Perhaps more significantly, he never graduated from college - not as we view college that is!
Nevertheless, his clarity, his insight, his commitment to the laws of nature and nature’s God, helped to preserve and exult America’s stalwart commitment to the truth and make it a shining light throughout the world, at a very dark moment in history.
The program contains audio introduction from the Nuremberg trials, and several quotes from Justice Robert Jackson’s thinking.
As a matter of judicial temperament, the new Justice Jackson, Justice Ketanji Jackson reveals a diametrically different approach to legal reasoning. Sometimes called positivist law, the antipode of natural or higher law, these are laws which are simply created whole cloth by the lawmaker. While called ‘positivist’, this is not a reference to electrical charge, or mathematical deductions, it refers to the fact that they are simply ‘posited’ as a statement or suggestion, or usually a declared mandate.
But as listeners to Life Matters already know, an assertion is not a fact. Declaring a statement is true, does not make it true. Positing a law, in particular an untested and unproven law supported only by verbiage and not actually demonstrably tested, is a recipe for cultural disaster.
Ideas have consequences. Ideas are expressed in words. Ideas and words that are enforced, are laws.
Laws can be very dangerous things if they are not carefully examined, and tested, and proven under the weight of higher principles and reason. These higher principles are demonstrable in the laws of nature and nature’s God, both physical laws of science and mathematics, as well as ethical and moral laws, such as stealing and murder. There is an order to the universe and these higher laws are in escapable. But they must be sought out.
We ignore the order of the universe to our own peril.
At the hearings for Justice Ketanji Jackson, her view of the law is made quite clear. There is no commitment to objective facts. It is created, posited, declared ‘de facto’ law that guides her thinking.
Several minutes from her confirmation hearing are contained in the program. Senator Blackburn wisely examines definitive statements from Justice Jackson’s past, her commitment to progressive ideology is examined, and the famous question of: “What is a woman?,” concludes a startling analysis of “facts” from the mind of a positivist, conjectural, Justice.
The two Justices Jackson offer a stunning contrast between higher law and asserted or posited law. The United States of America was founded on the principles that there is an ordered universe and that there is a manner by which to determine just or higher laws.