A quick thought on legal realism and dignity
Sometimes its easy to buy into the idea that a judge’s decisions depend on what she “ate for breakfast.” Despite this potential problem, I’m not disillusioned with the law. If a judge makes a poor decision, the law may rest in its impoverished state; but sooner or later someone’s life is likely to come in contact with that law. At that moment, the chords of justice ought to pull at any judge’s heart and motivate him to change the law out of a natural respect for the dignity of man. Even though a judge may uphold a poor decision, eventually the people will overcome it because the judges are bound to respect the people. They know that the authority of their decisions rest on the respect of the people. With successive confrontations between the law and humanity each law becomes more correct, or in other words, more efficient–defined well enough that litigation is unnecessary. The next question is what are the criteria for understanding why men decide something is just or fair? I suppose the answer to this would be the whole study of law, but it seems from this short note that the most fundamental principles of laws rest on sustaining the dignity of man. Kant grounded this dignity in man’s inherent nature as a rational being. The idea explains quite well the relationship between judges and the people. Kant said:
For, all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as a means but always at the same time as ends in themselves. But from this there arises a systematic union of rational beings through common objective laws, that is, a kingdom, which can be called a kingdom of ends (admittedly only an ideal) because what these laws have as their purpose is just the relation of these beings to one another as ends and means.(Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 4:433)
For more information, see Kant’s third formulation of the categorical imperative