Summer officially ends early Sunday morning, September 23. If you’re looking for a collection of haiku and senryu focused on the autumn equinox, end of summer and/or the start of fall, try our post from a year ago, “autumnal equinox haiku.”
cut grass
i sweep away
summer’s end
. . ………………………. . . Roberta Beary – The Heron’s Nest (Sept. 2005)autumn equinox
making a new arrangement
out of the old. . . . Pamela Miller Ness – The Heron’s Nest (Dec. 2003)
Haiku poets, and most sentient beings, love the changing of the seasons. Not liking hot weather, I especially enjoy the transition into Fall. On the other end of the human spectrum, however, many judges having become very negative about some things ending — especially, their life tenure on the bench, through artificial means like term limits.
A prime example is Chief Justice John Roberts, who apparently has equated judicial terms limits with an assault on judicial independence and gets the topic into every public presentation. The lastest example came two days ago at Syracuse University, where he was helping to open a new building at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. See “Chief justice stresses judicial independence: Without it, he says, a society’s “noble promises” of freedom are worthless,” Syracuse Post-Standard (Sept. 20, 2007); journalist professor Mark Obbie’s LawBeat weblog, But enough about you . . . (Sept. 19, 2007).
Robert Ambrogi has a good summary of media reaction to the Roberts’ speech in “Roberts Gets Lesson in Free Speech” (LegalBlogWatch, Sept. 20, 2007):
From reports of those who attended, the message of his speech came down to this: the First Amendment means nothing without an independent judiciary to uphold it. From that followed this secondary message: Term limits for judges threaten judicial independence and therefore threaten the First Amendment.
Bob excerpts negative reactions by Obbie and Mauro, as well as Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick, who pointedly pointed out in “Telling It Like It Isn’t: John Roberts speaks out. A little” (Sept. 19, 2007):
“The chief justice doesn’t explain today how twisting the ambiguous language of ‘Bong hits 4 Jesus’ into a pro-drug message in order to suppress it protects us from the tyrannical linguistic preferences of the ruling elites.”
We clearly do need strong judges to help assure our First Amendment and other constitutional rights. But I frankly do not see the connection between term limits on judges and the continued protection of those rights. Indeed, one reason that so many people are talking about limiting the time a Supreme Court justice can remain on that bench is precisely the fact that certain conservative justices who seem quite unfriendly to First Amendment and similar rights may very well be with us, curtailing those rights, for decades to come.
Yes, there could be political reasons for limiting the term of judges. But, term limitations that apply across the board to all judges serving on a particular court, or all federal courts, would seem to have little to do with how a particular judge or a full court will rule in a particular matter or series of cases. Knowing you only have X years to spend on a court might motivate you to want to make sure you make your mark — but, I do not see how it limits judicial independence. It, in fact, helps limit executive powers, since no President will be able to affect court decisions three or four decades in the future by packing a court with youthful jurists.
autumn equinox —
waking to
summer’s last cricketfall’s first sunset —
.
driving due west
squinting
. . . ………………………………………… dagosan
“last cricket” – Nisqually Delta Review (2006)