 “Why do Americans do what the courts say?” the chief justice of Ghana once asked former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. “What is the secret?” Breyer told her that there is no secret – only history, custom, and shared understandings. In a stirring Wall Street Journal essay, Justice Breyer writes: “President Andrew Jackson helped to illustrate what the rule of law isn’t. In 1832 the Supreme Court held that the Cherokee Indian tribe owned Northern Georgia (where gold had been discovered). Jackson said that Georgia should ignore the Court’s order – in Horace Greely’s paraphrase, ‘John Marshall made his decision, now let him enforce it’ … Luckily for the U.S., we can’t find another Jackson-like example of defiance… “History suggests that, in the U.S., the rule of law surrounds us like the air, essential but invisible. Why has it gained such automatic acceptance? Perhaps because, as Jackson found, the nation can’t work otherwise; perhaps, because its acceptance accompanied a growing belief in equality and fairness.” Justice Breyer looks to the central metaphor in Camus’s novel, The Plague, in which an infectious disease stands in for Nazi occupation in France. Justice Breyer writes: “The rule of law is a weapon – not the only weapon, but an important one – that our societies use to help prevent the re-emergence of that plague germ.” Comments are closed.
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