From the DFP via How Appealing:

Restoring judicial restraint

Running roughshod over GOP precedents would only diminish court’s moral authority

In the decade between 1998 and 2008, a Republican Michigan Supreme Court majority installed by Gov. John Engler dramatically recast the rules by which criminal and civil litigants are obliged to play.

The impact of their decisions was felt in virtually every sphere of state law, from consumer rights and employer-employee relations to environmental regulation and landlord-tenant disputes. The chief beneficiaries were the same interests — insurance companies, health care providers and other large corporations — whose campaign donations bankrolled the GOP justices’ ascendancy.

By 2006, according to an analysis by the Michigan Law Weekly, the Engler Court (under a succession of GOP chief justices) had reversed 61 state Supreme Court precedents in just five years — more than three times the 18 overturned by its Democratic-controlled predecessor court in the same period of time.

In a blistering dissent in Rowland v. Washtenaw County Road Commission — a 2007 case in which the Republican majority reversed two more 30-year-old precedents that had made it easier for injured motorists and pedestrians to sue a negligent municipality — Democratic Justice Marilyn Kelly said the GOP’s disdain for precedent was destroying “the certainty and stability of the law” and undermining respect for the court.

“What has changed … to compel a complete reversal in this law?” Kelly asked. “There is but one answer, the makeup of the court.”

What’s good for the goose?

Now, as the state Supreme Court begins a new term, there’s new chief justice at the helm — none other than Kelly herself. The 2008 election, in which Democratic challenger Diane Hathaway unexpectedly defeated the sitting chief justice, Engler-appointee Cliff Taylor, has given Democrats a tenuous working majority on the state’s highest court — although it hinges, for at least the next 14 months, on the mercurial Justice Elizabeth Weaver, a dissident Republican who feuded bitterly with Taylor and joined with Democratic justices Hathaway and Michael Cavanagh to assure Kelly’s election as chief justice. Continue reading →