Good government requires a sound and fair legal system that protects private property rights and individual freedoms, that treats people equally and in so doing counterbalances political power, that operates along clear guidelines and is understandable and predictable; and that has an effective and fair criminal justice system.
It is extremely important in the application of the law to guard against giving unfair advantage to politically favored interests.
It is critical to guard against erosion of the Constitution by introduction of incompatible ideology through the judicial system, particularly when this route is used to circumvent the normal political process.
The justice system should treat everyone equally to the maximum extent practical and be based on common sense and tradition – what has proved practical in practice. It should be predictable and not arbitrary, designed to achieve common sense results and to fit the punishment to the misdeed (to have a proper sense of proportion). It should serve the public interest and not the particular interest of those with political power.
A legal system that respects property rights, both physical and intellectual, is essential to a well-functioning economy and a requirement for increasing productivity.
A society cannot flourish without respect for private property by both its laws and its citizens. Property rights must be well protected by a fair and consistently enforced system of justice. Contracts must be respected by the justice system and reliably honored and enforced.
Note: Historically most of the major Supreme Court decisions that have violated the spirit of the Constitution have had damaging effects on the economy and/or on family and institutional stability and morals generally, i.e., they have contributed to the weakening of the social fabric.
The liberal fear of conservative Supreme Court justices is unjustified because genuinely conservative judges merely try to ensure that our laws are consistent with the written Constitution and the way it was intended to work when it was written rather than to modify the law to fit their own ideology. They try to fit the law appropriately to current circumstances but in a way that does not violate the principles of the original Constitution. Liberal justices prefer the concept of the “living Constitution”. The living Constitution theory holds that it is appropriate to treat the Constitution with extreme flexibility and for justices to adapt it to their opinion of what they think the law ought to be. They justify this by saying current conditions are so changed from those of the time the Constitution was written that it needs to be reinterpreted to align with the times. What this does is to substitute judges’ preferences for those important concepts outlined in the Constitution. In a sense this becomes a violation of the rule of law because it is a substitution of someone’s opinion for what has been a well-known rule.
Liberal justices are so dangerous because they are able to make up new rules and even use the Constitution as a weapon against itself by deeming certain legislative acts unconstitutional when they don’t agree with their own preferences on the matter at hand. This is usually done when there is a strident element of popular opinion trending in this direction – one of the things the Constitution was intended to protect against.