Posted by Ilya Somin:
George Will on Umpires as "Baseball's Judicial Branch":
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_04_05-2009_04_11.shtml#1239257443
Conservative columnist George Will has written [1]an op ed describing
the role of umpires as "baseball's judicial branch." He joins a long
list of jurists, including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts,
who have analogized umpires to judges:
Baseball is . . . the only sport that asks an on-field official to
demarcate the most important aspect of the field of play -- the
strike zone. Although defined in the rule book, its precise
dimensions are determined daily by the home plate umpire.
Umpires are islands of exemption from America's obsessive
lawyering: As has been said, three strikes and you're out -- the
best lawyer can't help you. But because it is the national pastime
of a litigious nation, baseball is the only sport in which a
nonplayer is allowed onto the field to argue against rulings.
Umpires are used to having their eyesight questioned -- when
someone criticized Bruce Froemming's, he said, "The sun is 93
million miles away, and I can see that" -- but their integrity is
unquestioned . . . As umpires say, "If they played by the honor
system, they wouldn't need us."
Sport -- strenuous exertion structured and restrained by rules --
replicates the challenges of political freedom. Umpires, baseball's
judicial branch, embody what any society always needs and what
America, in its current financial disarray, craves -- regulated
striving that, by preventing ordered competition from descending
into chaos, enables excellence to prevail.
Some of Will's points strike me as stretches. But he is right to focus
on the umpires' broad discretionary authority over the strike zone,
which is indeed somewhat analogous to judges' broad discretion in
exercising the power of judicial review. I drew a similar analogy in
[2]this post.
References
1.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/08/AR2009040803462.html
2. http://volokh.com/posts/1217669631.shtml
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