It's crucial to understand the process behind court decisions

Gail Prudenti, BridgeTower Media Newswires

If all you know of Herman Melville’s magnum opus is that Captain Ahab dies and the whale survives, you really haven’t understood Moby Dick. You’ve missed the bigger story, the nuance and the symbolism that makes the novel such an endearing treatise on nature, fate, evil, obsession and all-consuming hatred.

So it also goes with judicial opinions.

As a former judge, it frustrates me when I see talking head commentators and others opining about judicial decisions that they have obviously never read. I often wonder if even 5 % of the people who love Roe v. Wade, or loathe Roe v. Wade, have ever actually read Roe v. Wade.

Justice is a process more than a result, and while the bottom-line of a decision is obviously key, the route to that bottom line is just as or even more important. It is crucial to understand how and why a court got from Point A to Point Z.

A court may be compelled by prior precedent to come to a particular conclusion. There were many times as a judge when I might have preferred a different outcome but was constrained by the principles of stare decisis (to stand by things decided) and duty bound to issue a decision that I didn’t necessarily agree with because that’s where the facts and the applicable law led. Every judge I have ever known has issued decisions that go against their personal beliefs or wishes because they understand that the law needs to be consistent and predictable, and not subject to the whims of different judges at different times. There are, of course, occasions when a high court reverses a precedent that has proven unworkable or wrong (such as the separate but equal policy adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson and rejected unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education), but those occasions are, and should be, rare.

Further, a new precedent will probably have implications going forward, so whether one, as a policy matter, approves or disapproves of a particular decision should be based on how the legal reasoning may apply to similar fact patterns in the future. We may like the result of a decision in one case, and very much dislike the result in another case that is dictated by the precedent in the first matter.

I’m afraid the nuances of jurisprudence are often missed in the age of sound-bite news, and I wish the media, as well as academics and politicians and others who opine on an opinion, would discuss the reasoning and precedent that lead to a particular result. Consider the recent decision of the Appellate Division, First Department, imposing an interim suspension on former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his conduct after President Trump’s defeat in the presidential election.
I’ve heard and read all sorts of news stories and commentary on the decision, with some of those on the left gloating and some of those on the right pouting-and neither side giving any indication that they bothered to fully read the decision.

To its credit, the First Department closely examined the Rules of Conduct governing attorney behavior, carefully examined the evidence, scrupulously weighed the arguments for and against interim suspension and produced a 33-page decision that, regardless of the outcome, stands as a model of clarity. Without commenting on whether I agree or disagree with the final result, I tip my hat to the five judges who crafted a well-reasoned, methodical decision that clearly explains what the court had before it, how it analyzed the issues and why the jurists believed the law required them to rule as they did. A decision-including the Giuliani decision-cannot be understood merely by knowing the result, any more than Moby Dick can be understood by knowing the whale sinks Ahab’s ship and the captain meets a gruesome ending.

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Judge Gail Prudenti is the dean of the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University.