Law Within Limits: Judge Williams and the Constitution
If the Constitution of the United States means what the Supreme Court says it means—if judges swear oaths, not to support the Constitution, but to support “some body of law created by the Supreme Court”—then the judges of the unfortunately named “inferior Courts” must have little to do with it. However respected or talented they might be, the judges in such a world would be “bound down by strict rules and precedents” more tightly than Hamilton ever imagined. Not only would they “close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law,” as Chief Justice Marshall warned in Marbury v. Madison; they would close their eyes even on the law, and see only the decisions of courts.
Many lawyers and judges experience something like this in their daily lives. Most judges are lower-court judges, most litigators spend their days in lower-court litigation, and most legal education, perhaps unwittingly, is aimed at lower-court practice. (Students might debate higher-court opinions in class, but their exams generally train them to take these opinions as fixed.) This focus makes it easy to confuse law with lower-court law, the blend of actual legal rules and intervening precedent that shapes much of a lawyer’s ordinary experience. Yet in a legal system like ours, in which even higher-court judges may err, mistaking one sort of law for the other can blind us to our actual legal obligations.
Judge Stephen F. Williams did not make that mistake. Over the decades of his distinguished service on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he was hardly averse to “high-quality doctrinal analysis,” to “reading a mass of cases” and “pulling them together into a coherent whole.” He praised such analysis, criticized those who scorned it, and was remarkably adept at carrying it out. But he never took it as the sum and substance of constitutional law. Rather, in his nonjudicial writings, Judge Williams understood the Constitution of the United States as binding law, enacted at a particular time with particular content, which content should be interpreted (whenever unclear) in light of the reasons for its original enactment.
As a judge on the D.C. Circuit, moreover, Judge Williams acted on these views: in cases of first impression, in filling the gaps between precedents, and in criticizing some of the Supreme Court decisions that he faithfully obeyed. He did so through a careful consideration of text and history, with an eye to the economic causes and consequences of legal doctrine, and with the fierce independence of mind that led him occasionally to write concurrences to his own majority opinions. And where he followed the reasoning of dubious precedent, he did so with the kind of intellectual precision and attention to the factual record familiar to anyone who knew him.
In so doing, he offered both lawyers and judges a model of intellectually serious adherence to law. Judge Williams should be honored for this adherence, for his honesty to his readers, and for his careful appreciation of the limits on his role.
