Walk into any federal courthouse – and it is likely that you will see a mural or a statue of Lady Justice, weighing on her scale the argument presented by the plaintiff against that of the defendant, and impartially awarding victory to the stronger one.
This promise of honest judging is reinforced by the judicial procedure itself, with its exchange of argument and counterargument to make us believe that adjudication of a dispute is an honest and rational procedure.
Not really. Judges routinely invent the argument of their own on behalf of the parties, turning themselves into parties to the case, thus making their rulings non-judicial – for it is the most basic, axiomatic rule that a party to the case cannot be adjudicating a case it is a party to.
And when a litigant, feeling that judge’s active participation in forming the argument of the opposing party (or litigant’s own, weakening it or completely inverting it in the process) betrays the promise of impartial judging offered by Lady Justice, and sues the judge for fraud, he is told (to quote the 1967 Supreme Court case of Pierson v. Ray) that judges are immune from prosecution “even when the judge is accused of acting maliciously and corruptly.”
And you will never-ever guess why. The reason judges gave themselves legal right to act “maliciously and corruptly” (for immunity from prosecution for doing something is precisely what constitutes a legal “right” to do it) is, you’ll be told, “not for the protection or benefit of a malicious or corrupt judge, but for the benefit of the public.”
Now think about it for a second. “For the benefit of the public” government can lie and cheat. This is the whole art of statecraft in a nutshell, all Machiavelli’s treatises condensed into one short sentence.
And if Americans – our upright and moral and democratic nation – take this for granted, why won’t the Iranians? We have been told, and told again that their government accepted a nuclear deal with the West; yet what if their government (which, after all, invested tens of billions of dollars into nuclear enrichment infrastructure) thinks that it is “for the benefit of the public” to have the atom bomb? And since, “for the benefit of the public,” government can lie to, and cheat even its own citizens (as done by the third of the US government that is its judiciary), why not lie to, and cheat the Great Satan, and all the smaller Satans too (since they have no legitimacy anyway, for they do not follow the True Faith), by giving the West empty promises of honest nuclear dealing?
Statecraft is not one thing in America and another in Iran; its application is universal. And if empty promises offered by Lady Justice teach us anything, it is that ends justify the means and that for the higher purpose – “for the benefit of the public” – promises, no matter how lofty – are null and void, are mere fools’ hopes.
Not a cozy thought perhaps, but a necessary one when analyzing Washington’s nuclear dealings with Tehran – or our own judiciary’s dealings with our own fellow-citizens.