Judges should look at the "spirit" behind the words of the Constitution rather than interpreting its language literally when ruling on cases, Judge John T. Noonan argued Monday in his lecture, titled "Reading the Constitution."
Noonan, a judge on the activist, San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the author of a book about the First Amendment, compared interpreting the Constitution to interpreting religious texts and argued against literal readings of the country's arbiter of legal judgment.
"The main problem with written text is fundamentalism -- taking certain words and treating them as decisive," Noonan said.
Too many judges, like Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, treat the Constitution like the Bible, Noonan said. Such text worship is a "human phenomena," Noonan said, adding that obedience to the text in such a manner is a weakness, promoting rigidity in one's thought process.
According to Noonan, every working judge has come to the conclusion that "he who interprets the law, makes the law" and that interpretation gives the Constitution vitality. He also compared the Constitution's balanced perspective to the biological balance within a human being.
Noonan pointed to several Supreme Court cases -- Marbury v. Madison, Chisholm v. Georgian, Hans v. Louisiana and Ex Parte Young -- that he said reveal the judicial precedent for loose interpretations of the Constitution to maintain the balance of the law.
The appeals judge also noted that many of the greatest constitutional scholars, such as Freund, Gunther and Wechsler, have been Jewish. According to Noonan, they came from a tradition that valued moving away from narrow interpretation and toward the spirit of the text.
Noonan also related a few decisions of conscience he had to make as a judge. In one case, a man had testified that the government did not have a right to make him file income taxes because it would constitute forcing him to bear witness against himself. The man failed to file his taxes twice, and Noonan eventually decided to threaten him with jail time. The judge said that at the time he felt somewhat like a member of "the Inquisition of the Middle Ages." However, the man gave in and filed his taxes before Noonan had to act on his threat to send him to jail.
Another defendant was convicted of his third felony -- stealing a cassette worth less than $200. Under California's three-strikes law, the man would have gone to jail for at least 25 years. Noonan decreased the severity of the man's sentence, he said, because there was a great disproportion between the nature of the crime and the sentence. Constitutionally, the sentence could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Noonan's address was the 2004 Thurlow Gordon Lecture, presented by the Rockefeller Center and The Daniel Webster Legal Society.
