Court Politics

A quotation from political scientist James L. Gibson echoes through Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role: “Judges’ decisions are a function of what they prefer to do, tempered by what they think they ought to do, but constrained by what they perceive is feasible to do.” Although the tenor of the quote is somewhat more cynical than what Emmett Macfarlane sets out to demonstrate, it indicates roughly what he reveals about judging at the Supreme Court of Canada. While the Supreme Court seems ever-present in news headlines, its inner workings remain the most opaque among our major governing institutions. Macfarlane describes the aim of his book as being to “open the black box”; suffice it to say that he has done so masterfully by synthesizing earlier research and supplementing it with his own extensive work. He has produced not a meditation on how Supreme Court judging should work, but an empirical...