Heres a question —

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Here’s a question — not the rhetorical kind, a genuine question.

I didn’t delve deeply into the legal — as in black letter law — side of the Schiavo case. But watching that part from a distance at least, I didn’t have the sense that any of the various rulings in the case — original or on appeal — departed in any meaningful way from the black letter law as it exists in the state of Florida.

Maybe the law is wrong and should be changed. Or maybe the law is proper but in this case it produced a bad result — and even a good law can fail to produce the ‘right’ result in a given case. But set those points aside.

Was there any clear point in the legal history of this case at which, purely on legal intepretation grounds, any significant question should have been judged in a different manner?

I raise this because one of this site’s regular readers and correspondents just dropped me a note about some program he was watching on C-Span in which some staffer from the Hill was about to blow a fuse over unaccountable activist judges and how they all need to be impeached.

But if the answer to the question above is ‘no’, then isn’t the real beef of all these Schiavo-hounds that these judges aren’t activist enough in departing from the law to get results the hounds want?

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