Some Reasons Courts Have Become Active Participants in the Search for Ultimate Moral and Political Truth

Authors

George C. Christie, Duke Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Abstract

This short essay was prompted by the increasing delegation to courts of the responsibility for deciding what are basically moral questions, such as in litigation involving human rights conventions, as well as the responsibility for deciding basic issues of social policy with at best only the most general guidelines to guide their exercise of judicial discretion. The essay discusses some of the reasons for this delegation of authority and briefly describes how courts have struggled to meet this obligation without transcending accepted notions governing the limits of judicial discretion.

Citation

George C. Christie, Some Reasons Courts Have Become Active Participants in the Search for Ultimate Moral and Political Truth, in Le Droit Comparé et...[Comparative Law and...] 315-321 (Alexis Albanian & Olivier Moréteau eds., 2015)