BlueOregon poses a challenge to Oregon's judicial candidates. My question is posted below.

"Yesterday the Oregon Chapter of the American Constitution Society held a forum for the three candidates for the Oregon Supreme Court seat being vacated by former Chief Justice Wallace Carson. They are Judge Virginia Linder of the Oregon Court of Appeals, former Labor Commissioner Jack Roberts, and Pendleton trial lawyer Gene Hallman."
[ BlueOregon: Oregon Supreme Court Forum ]

My Question:

Mr. Roberts,

Does the presumption of lawfulness of government action, as it effects a single individual in their economic pursuits, render the judiciary irrelevant in the protection of individual rights?

I would assert that an assertive judiciary in the realm of economic regulation, in matters like prohibition of monopoly, would not be judicial activism but would just add one more layer of protection of the individual.

The notion of judicial activism, at the US Supreme Court level, as well as that for state courts, has been trumpeted so loudly as to render the court useless to aid the individual against the overwhelming power of interest groups in every single other realm.

Economic corruption, in fact, has routinely been labeled as lawful by statute. In public-private partnerships I would like the combined enterprise to be denied the presumption of lawfulness that is usually afforded to government action.

In this context, when PERS together with the OIC act in like manner to that of a private investment banker, and use the government to obtain a captive set of depositors, it should be looked upon as if JP Morgan got a law passed that required a subset of citizens to make deposits at their bank and their bank only. Each of these two alternatives impose a like burden upon the individual, and the government's characterization of an ad hoc justification is irrelevant to defining that individual interest. (I raise this fact specific issue only because it best illustrates the destructiveness of the political branches resulting from the abandonment of an assertive judiciary to preserve things like the equal privileges and immunities in the economic realm. My initial love is in economics, and later the interplay between economics and the law. It is really an economics question rather than legal.)

The court is the last resort for representing individual interests, as the interest groups have already dismissed them, inherently, via the political branches in our republican form of government.

Thoughts?

-- OregonLiberty.us
-- Ron Ledbury