What’s Wrong with the World

*headdesk*

While I'm glad that they were saved the cost of setting the precedent... oy.

Yeah, when Kit is older and Kaboodle (possibly Kaboodle 2, as well) are here, we'll probably join.

http://judgepedia.org/index.php/Joe_Dale_Walker

Thanks for the link, David. It gives us the name of the judge. It's a little outdated, though, as the order was indeed vacated by the MS Supreme Court.

The article rather amusingly is written as though a judge can simply issue a court order out of the blue like that with no case to try to act as a one-man investigative unit to find out whether parents are in compliance with laws. That is decidedly not one of his authorized powers.

I like "Kit" and "Kaboodle," Foxfier.

This country desperately needs to start stripping judges and prosecutors of their licenses to practice law when they go off the reservation created by the legislature.

Foxfier,

I can see it now. For family reunions, you'll have to bring the whole kit and kaboodles.

The Chicken

*grin* Glad the nicknames go over well.

Much agreement with Mike T.

The ending would be even happier if it ended with the judge being impeached and permanently disbarred from practice of law in any capacity (him ending up homeless and destitute from inability to do anything useful would just be gravy).

The ending would be even happier if it ended with the judge being impeached and permanently disbarred from practice of law in any capacity (him ending up homeless and destitute from inability to do anything useful would just be gravy).

I think Peter Hitchens said it best when he asked where in the Bible it says "Blessed are the spongers..."

Much agreement with Mike T.

Read the blog The Agitator. Some of the behavior that Balko has documented from prosecutors is so gut-wrenching it would make most of the conservatives on this site enthusiastically support vigilantism.

As long as he's a judge, he doesn't need a license to practice law, provided his judge's salary (and whatever income he receives in bribes) is sufficient to support his lifestyle. I think judges are payed well (even if they don't get any bribes), and I wonder if judges are even allowed to practice law.

I often wonder if Lydia's observation (that many people who have power are driven to get more) explains most of our social problems. I'm often tempted to correct 1 Timothy by replacing "the love of money" with some other phrase. Why not "the love of power" or simply "pride?" The love of money must be one of the main roots of moral evil, but is it the primary one?

I believe the I Timothy verse can be interpreted to mean "all kinds of evil" not "all evil."

Yeah, HSLDA has been doing good work for 20 years, they are top-notch.

Surely there is a mechanism in Ole Miss to take aim at the judge and git his rear kicked out. If not impeachment in the legislature, maybe something else? Can you file a suit against a judge for an act like that? You know, get some kind of recompense / fitting restraint placed on him? (Well, in theory, you can at least _file_ a suit claiming anything you want. But you won;t get it heard with any attention if you don't have at least something that looks like a legal basis.) The thing that gets me is that if he displays that kind of complete ignorance / disregard for basic principles of law, there should be many, many parties out there, like the legislature, and like the rest of the bench - sitters, who should want to be well rid of him.

Tony

I know he's elected, Tony. At a minimum, they should be able to get him defeated the next time around. Other than that, I'm going to guess impeachment may be the only thing.

Hey, Judegipedia talks like what he did was maybe okay. Has some line like, "Despite the fact that he was trying to enforce the schooling laws, the Mississippi Supreme Court got involved." Apparently the world is even full of ignorant people who are interested in judges...

Hey, Judegipedia talks like what he did was maybe okay. Has some line like, "Despite the fact that he was trying to enforce the schooling laws, the Mississippi Supreme Court got involved." Apparently the world is even full of ignorant people who are interested in judges...

He violated the law to enforce the law. I won't hold my breath waiting for his (probably liberal) defenders to justify the police when they violate the constitutional rights of a minority in order to solve a case...

It's a particularly ignorant statement, because it implies that the judge has some sort of investigative role like that merely in virtue of being a judge. In reality, he has no more prerogative to get up one fine morning and start demanding information in order to investigate home schoolers than any man on the street has. That's not the kind of legal system we live in. Judges have to rule on and in the context of cases brought before them. Heck, if he lived down the street from a drug ring, he'd still have to get the police to investigate, the prosecutor to bring charges, etc. His being a judge wouldn't make him able legally to start issuing court orders off his own bat like that.

Thanks for linking the wiki David. This part:

It's been determined that Judge Walker sought the information of homeschooled children in the district to determine which parents are attempting to get around school attendance laws. Still, the Mississippi Supreme Court has become involved, staying Walker's order and demanding to know what authority he had to request such information from the beginning. As of April 14, the judge as not explained his action, nor responded the Supreme Court. [3]

It's still baffling to me what the judge thought he could possibly gain by doing this. Seems like there is a missing piece of the puzzle.

It's still baffling to me what the judge thought he could possibly gain by doing this. Seems like there is a missing piece of the puzzle.

You know, I really don't think there is. I think the judge just had a motive to go on a one-man crusade against "all" of the "fake homeschoolers" (existing in his mind) and was so ignorant of law (as whoever wrote that bit of the judgeipedia article may be as well) that he believed just being a judge gave him the authority to launch a personal investigation using his Judge Superpowers to find out who was or wasn't doing it right.

Ironic, the judge getting schooled on the law by homeschoolers. Maybe if he had been homeschooled himself he wouldn't have been so stupid.

It's a simple question of legal standing - the judge qua judge has no standing to enter the order he did.

Don't know how things are done in Ole Miss, but state court judges in Texas need to have a law license. They may not be able to practice as a lawyer before a court because of the conflicting roles, but they still need to hold the licensure.

This is all very similar to what we went through here in Illinois last February. A state senator woke up one morning and decided that he should require all homeschoolers to register their children with their local school district. In Illinois, home schools are considered private schools and since private school children are not registered with their local public school district, just what was this guy thinking? It took a good month to get him to back down and remove his provision from the greater education bill being written. He kept whining that he was concerned about truant homeschoolers. That's a Laugh Out Loud if there ever was one.

1. Judges are generally immune from civil liability for the decisions they render. This is, all in all, a good policy: imagine if your opponent in a civil case could sue the judge when you win. It lets kooks like this guy off the hook, but that's just the way it goes. Impeachment and such options are of course available, and possibly appropriate in a case like this: that just wasn't a bad decision (every judge makes a bad decision once in a while), it was a gross abuse of power entirely of his own making.

2. Most jurisdictions do not require a judge to hold a law license. Mississippi actually does require that a judge be an attorney. But a judge cannot practice law while sitting on the bench.

It's a simple question of legal standing

Actually, it has nothing to do with standing. Standing is an entirely distinct doctrine concerning the capacity of a litigant to prosecute a lawsuit. It is instead a matter of jurisdiction. See Miss. Const. Art. 6, S. 159: "The chancery court shall have full jurisdiction in the following matters and cases..." As Lydia alluded to above, it's quite clear in common-law jurisprudence that a case (or "matter") must be instituted by someone other than the judge. Read, for instance, the large body of "case or controversy" caselaw in the federal courts.

1. Judges are generally immune from civil liability for the decisions they render. This is, all in all, a good policy: imagine if your opponent in a civil case could sue the judge when you win.

I agree. What most people don't know is that this absolute immunity, via SCOTUS overreach, has been applied to prosecutors as well for a few decades now. Even if you could prove that the prosecution's case depended entirely on perjury, and that the prosecutor was fully aware of the perjurious nature of the testimony, you can't sue the prosecutor in federal court if they were acting only as a prosecutor (rather than as part of the investigation itself). Their logic was that anything else would taint the decision making process of prosecutors on who to pursue.

Of course, this overreach also means that you can't pursue a Section 1983 case against one, even though Congress passed that into law before that ruling...

Titus is right that "standing" isn't quite the term, though it's understandable that someone might use that term for the actual concept involved.

Gina, I understand the comparison you're drawing, but I'll say this: At least that was something lawmakers were trying to do. It was a really bad idea, but at least in the legal system it's their role. For a judge to do this all on his own is legally really outrageous, just as a formal matter. It's not even just a matter of the substance of what he was trying to do. For example, even if he were trying to find drug houses by demanding that some city office give him a list of addresses of all properties that rent to more than x people or something like that, it would be equally crazy. It just isn't his role at all.

What most people don't know is that this absolute immunity, via SCOTUS overreach, has been applied to prosecutors as well for a few decades now.

Actually, prosecutors are not nearly as immune as judges. Inmates of Attica Correctional Facility v. Rockefeller quite correctly holds that the separation of powers prohibits a court from enjoining a prosecutor to institute a prosecution. But a line of discriminatory- and vindictive-prosecution cases running from Wayte v. United States and Blackledge v. Perry through Hartman v. Moore, do provide for the permissibility of actions for abusive prosecution. Admittedly, Moore especially makes that a very limited possibility, but 1) the alternatives are not exactly edifying or entirely convincing and 2) the Blackledge line only limits federal causes of action; Mississippi is free to create whatever sort of liability it wants for prosecutors. And I don't think Moore is as limited in its reasoning as you suggest: the Court very reasonably points out that a prosecutor's job is to prosecute criminals and that the hopes of administering a rule that examines why he prosecutes a given person who is actually engaged in criminal activity are essentially nil. If there are too many criminal laws (which is surely the case), that's a problem for legislative resolution.