The Rule of the Courts

M. Akram Faizer

A DOPTING A C ANADIAN S TYLE L EGISLATIVE O VERRIDE TO R ECONCILE A MERICAN J UDICIAL R EVIEW WITH D EMOCRATIC A CCOUNTABILITY AND THE R ULE OF L AW

M. Akram Faizer

Introduction

When I moved from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to the United States in August 1997 to attend the University of Notre Dame Law School, I was in relative awe of the United States, which, at the time, was in the midst of what then-Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan referred to as a “Goldilocks Economy.” This featured full employment, a booming stock market, a mighty dollar, improved living standards for racial minorities and the poor, a disappearing budget deficit and, to a then-Canadian immigrant of Sri Lankan Muslim origins, a seemingly incomparable rule of law frame work led by a highly prestigious Supreme Court whose nine justices were well known celebrities and public intellectuals. Having won the Cold and Gulf Wars, the U.S. under the first Bush and Clinton Administrations clearly set the standard for global leadership, supportive as they were of hemispheric free trade agreements, Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization, a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the expansion of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”) obligations eastward to include Poland and other former Warsaw Pact countries. While there were signs of dysfunction in the American political system and rule of law, including the mass incarceration of Black and Hispanic American young men and President Clinton’s 1998 impeachment due to what was called the Lewinsky Scandal, these problems

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