Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
All over America, GOP-led legislatures are pushing to impeachstate judges. Lawmakers in Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have moved in on the judicial branch, the most infamous of these crusades being the effort in Iowa to oust those state supreme court judges who voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Evidently that is still a “high crime or misdemeanor” to some. It’s one thing for politicians to seek out impeachment proceedings that are sui generis. But now legislators are including specific impeachment language in the text of their statutes. In Arizona, New Hampshire and Virginia, rump Republican lawmakers this year introduced bills making it an impeachable offense for judges to make rulings on FOIA requests or to merely cite international law. There’s a legal term-of-art for such efforts: it’s called “bat-shit crazy.” – Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic
