Professor Marc DeGirolami has a new piece in Commonweal, an independent journal of religion, politics and culture. In his essay, “Why Standing Matters: Same-Sex Marriage and the Role of the Courts” Professor DeGirolami considers standing in the context of two recent, historic Supreme Court cases–United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry. He argues,
[a]t its core, justiciability concerns the nature and duty of the judicial office. It poses a vital question of justice that precedes any substantive issue of civil rights. It asks, What are judges for? One of the most frequently intoned lines from any Supreme Court decision is that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.” But this line is misleading if read in a vacuum. It is emphatically not the province of judges to opine about the law in the abstract. It is not their province to state their views about the law whenever somebody gets it into his head to ask. That is not what judges are for. Judges—in our constitutional system and in many others—decide specific cases where the parties have a concrete stake in the outcome.
You can see the full essay here.
St. John's University Law Faculty Blog 