Associate Dean Amar Comments on California Supreme Court for Los Angeles Times
Vikram Amar, Associate Dean and Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, commented for the Los Angeles Times on Mariano-Florentino Cuellar and Leondra R. Kruger, the newest justices on the California Supreme Court, and how turnover in the Court may impact death penalty appeals.
Amar said that new justices typically are reluctant to overrule their predecessors because "it highlights all too much how the content of the law may be determined by the membership of a court" and conflicts with the notion that "the law is this thing that exists independently of judicial personality."
"We change the meaning of law over longer periods of]time by changing the membership of courts," Amar said. "That is a reality, but that reality exists alongside this fiction that law is this completely objective thing."
Vikram Amar, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Law with the UC Davis School of Law, is a national authority in the fields of constitutional law, civil procedure, criminal procedure, and remedies. His biweekly column for Justia.com, a leading provider of online legal information, centers on his expertise in constitutional law.