Item — HN Reader

>Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US.

Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.

In any case, you're confusing cause and effect.

The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.

If the Canadian Parliament had to give an up/down vote for a nominee, there would absolutely be far more attention paid to each nominee's opinions and qualifications ... and far more attention paid to that nominee's subsequent decisions.

1 comments

> Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.

Well, pretty much, yes. I've not lived in a country where judges really differ that much. And usually we don't even know their political affiliation. Because it really doesn't matter. This goes even for our supreme court (we call it the high council). Which isn't really that important to our daily lives anyway. They are just a last resort when people can't stop appealing.

In Holland they also don't rule on big things like this. They're not allowed to play politics. Just to apply the law in specific cases only. Something like the supreme court deciding to overturn abortion legalisation is really unthinkable. Besides, if they rule on one case it has zero effect on anyone else, because we don't have precedent-based common law. This is exactly the kind of issue I have with common law.

> The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.

Isn't that a similar process to the US? Basically the currently ruling party gets to pick the supreme court judges. There's congress validation but they rarely would take the pick of the non-majority party.

Though in our case we don't really have a 'ruling party'. We have many parties and one is never enough to gain a majority so there's always a complicated coalition. It is a bit of a stumbling block forming a government but I abhor the first-past-the-post system like in the US because it makes politics a zero-sum game: A loss for one party is a win for the other. That stimulates dirty politics, smearing, and of course there's the risk of a bunch of nutcases coming to power and nothing being able to be done about that. Most of our governments collapse before their 4 years are up and in most cases this was not a bad thing (especially our last one that was full of populists, they were definitely a ton of nutcases and they didn't manage to stick it out a year before they collapsed in infighting lol).

>Isn't that a similar process to the US? Basically the currently ruling party gets to pick the supreme court judges.

The US Senate must approve all federal judges (among many federal posts, including the cabinet). If the president's party does not have a majority in the Senate, that means the president must nominate someone that at least some Senators from another party will vote for.

In Canada, UK, etc., whoever the PM says will be a judge becomes a judge; Parliament has absolutely no control over the process.

>Something like the supreme court deciding to overturn abortion legalisation is really unthinkable.

You seem to think—likely based on Reddit and Dutch reporters that just copy whatever the New York Times and Washington Post say—that abortion is "illegal in the US". The Dobbs decision in 2022 reversed the Supreme Court's own 1973 decision in Roe that abruptly voided all state laws banning abortion of any kind. In Dobbs, the court ruled that it had exceeded its remit, and returned the ability to legislate on abortion to the individual states.