this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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Legal analysis isn't an exact science. Different people place different weights on different methods of analysis and different types of evidence. Impartial just means that they'll apply the same weights regardless of the involved parties, not that they'll reach the exact same conclusion as every other impartial judge.
The most succinct way of putting it that I've seen
It'd be a real shame if there was systemic evidence of that simply not being true in the American justice system, be it the ever present racial discrepancies in sentencing or judicial reactions to things like systemic and pervasive wage theft.
It turns out applying their biases consistently just isn't the same thing as impartiality.
I wouldn't argue that most judges are impartial. I'm not sure who the straw man in the meme is supposed to be, I don't know who does. My point was just that there's nothing inherently nonsensical about coexisting impartial conservatives and impartial liberals who come to different conclusions in a case.
Sounds like having a bias towards wage theft consistently doesn't help with impartiality when the defendant and prosecutors are employer and employee. How do you convince people that the judge is impartial here?
That's why impartiality and liberal/conservative are different axes. A conservative judge may favor an analytical framework that creates an interpretation of existing laws that favors employers. As long as they consistently use that same analytical framework for other types of cases, they'd remain impartial despite being heavily conservative.
The point being, judges being impartial isn't all we should care about. Some analytical frameworks are just plain bad and we shouldn't be giving jobs to judges who use them.