-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Experts see high court's ruling language as crafty By Noah Bierman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Saturday, December 9, 2000 TALLAHASSEE -- Even legal scholars who agree with the Florida Supreme Court's 4-3 decision to manually recount ballots statewide used words like crafty, clever and radical to describe it. "I think of this as the kamikaze decision of the Florida Supreme Court," said Kim Lane Scheppele, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania invited by Democrats to address the state legislature on Monday. Scheppele said justices -- under pressure from legislators, the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts it overturned -- had to reason carefully to justify statewide recounts because not even the Democrats had asked for them. It is highly unusual for courts to offer a remedy that neither party requests, according to several constitutional scholars. How did the justices do it? By deferring to the judge they overturned in their ruling -- Leon County Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls. On almost every point of his original ruling, the justices overruled Sauls. But on one -- that a recount is only fair if it is statewide rather than in selective counties -- they agreed. Sauls used that logic to deny all recounts; the justices used it to allow them. In fact, that was Sauls' flimsiest legal argument, Scheppele said. But because the Supreme Court had no other legal precedent, it deferred to Sauls on that point because election laws give circuit judges the power to define the rules of a contested election. So they used his rules to offer a different solution. Scheppele called it clever. Others weren't so charitable. Critics say the justices went out of bounds. And on such an important and divisive issue, they jeopardized their own credibility with a split decision that contains the seeds of its own destruction in the dissenting opinion -- which uses phrases like "Constitutional crisis." "This is a mess," said Robert Bennett, the former dean of the Northwestern Law School. "I would have liked to see a unanimous opinion one way or another." Few would venture a guess on how or when the U.S. Supreme Court would act. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court sent back an earlier election decision the state high court made -- allowing hand recounts in selective counties -- because the U.S. court wanted Florida justices to justify their opinion through state law rather than the state constitution. Several experts believe the state justices used the U.S. Supreme Court's earlier action as a sort of a cheat sheet, a guide to couch the language they used in Friday's opinion carefully so it would withstand a federal challenge. But in both opinions, the justices came back to the same point, that counting votes trumps all other concerns in a democracy. And legal scholars, like politicians, will argue loudly over the wisdom in that decision. "The court took this notion of a right to vote and just made it the biggest bear in the woods and let it run over all the other animals that were there and gobbled them up to reach the result," said University of Florida's Joseph Little. Staff writer Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this story. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
