Roberts Links Judicial Independence, Free Speech
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. told students at Syracuse University yesterday that the First Amendment is only as strong as the judges who uphold it.
Roberts read words ensuring free speech protections, then revealed they were from the Soviet Union’s 1977 constitution, the Associated Press reports. “All lies,” he said. “Without an independent judiciary to give substance to the constitutional text as law, the words are nothing but empty promises.”
Roberts noted recent proposals to impose term limits on justices and appeared to lump them in with other threats to judicial independence, reports Tony Mauro on The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.
Roberts spoke before the dedication of a building for the school’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Some writers pointed out the irony of Roberts’ words after his majority opinion this year in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, which backed a school district that punished a student for unfurling a banner with that unusual phrase. It wasn’t lost on a protester, either, who displayed a sign following Roberts’ speech that read, “Bong Hits 4 Roberts,” reports The BLT.
“It’s an elegant formulation,” Dahlia Lithwick says of Roberts’ thesis in a column for Slate. “Attack the justices, limit their terms, restructure their courts, cut their pay, and they will lose their ability to protect you. Better to have the judiciary interpreting the words of the First Amendment than the president or the ruling political party. But wouldn’t that formulation assume that when those unpopular, unfashionable, unruly students want to say wacky things, the courts would have their backs?”
(A hat tip to How Appealing, which posted the Roberts stories.)
