The bench is not a forum for personal quarrel

National Review reports that justices of the Supreme Court have begun "trashing their colleagues" in terms the outlet judges unbecoming to the institution. I am told that the piece frames this as a threat to the Court's legitimacy — a word I find well chosen, though the writers of my own era would have said public confidence. The two phrases name the same fragile thing.

A court of law derives its authority from no army and no treasury. It holds only what the people are willing to lend it: the presumption that its judgments rise above the preferences of those who render them. The moment citizens come to see the bench as simply another theater of faction — where one judge assails another as a partisan would assail an opponent — that presumption begins to dissolve. And once dissolved, it is not quickly restored.

I knew this truth in a different form. Those who presided over our early institutions understood that precedent was not merely convenience; it was the habit by which power agreed to limit itself. A court that cannot discipline its own members in public decorum is teaching the Republic a dangerous lesson: that the office need not restrain the officeholder. I set great store by the opposite lesson, and I demonstrated it, imperfectly and at some cost, by stepping aside when staying would have been easy.

I do not pretend to know the specific opinions or personalities at issue here — that would require me to recall events far beyond my own season, and I will not feign such knowledge. What I can say, from the shape of the matter as reported, is that the content of any quarrel matters far less than the fact of its public display. Mudslinging, as National Review aptly calls it, signals to every observer that something other than deliberate reason is at work. And when citizens believe that, they begin to seek their justice — or their protection from injustice — through means that bypass the courts entirely. That is a road no republic should travel willingly.

The remedy is not silence on matters of law, nor the suppression of legitimate dissent within written opinions. Vigorous legal disagreement, argued with rigor in proper decisions, is the Court's great strength. The remedy is the restraint that distinguishes disagreement from contempt — the discipline of honoring the institution one inhabits even while disputing the reasoning of a colleague. That discipline is not weakness. It is the precise form of strength that public office demands and private temperament must supply.

My counsel to those who wear the robe is simply this: the Republic lent you authority it cannot easily recover if you spend it carelessly. Govern your words as you would govern your judgments — with the knowledge that both will outlast the moment and instruct those who come after you.