Home Depot's co-founder, Bernie Marcus, wrote an insightful piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal concerning coming rulings from the Supreme Court with the replacement of retiring Justice David Souter.
Marcus goes beyond the mainstream media focus on cases of social policy and focuses on potential changes due to Souter's tendencies to vote on the side of free enterprise. Marcus directly identifies this as an anti-labor stance, thus begging the obvious question.
Will the nominee to replace Souter respect the Constitution and our laws, or will s/he rule based on "empathy" and one's own personal life experiences?
To do the latter, Marcus argues, will be to damage our economic system severely. Especially the ability of small- and medium-sized companies to raise capital. If our courts, particularly the Supreme Court, are seen as anti-business, then investors will correctly revisit and revise their sense of risks associated with business investment.
Moving from a clear-cut tendency to apply the rule of law on the Supreme Court, to a preference to apply each and every Justice's personal life experiences as lenses through which to view the merits of plaintiffs and defendants, is to invite a completely capricious and inconsistent approach to the country's legal system.
Surely, this will be bad for everyone's economic health, as such an injection of uncertainty regarding the interpretation of our laws will inevitably lead to less investment due to the resulting implied risks. That will eventually lead to less employment and economic activity all around.
Hardly what most of our society would seem to want, nor attributes for which our country's economic system is known.
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