Tag: Alan Dershowitz

The following commentary by Alan M. Dershowitz was posted on the Hill website December 5, 2017:

Our Constitutional system of separation of power and checks and balances provides that the members of each branch of government be protected from legal consequences for performing their constitutionally mandated functions. Thus, Article I of the Constitution explicitly immunizes from arrest all members of Congress “during their attendance at the Sessions of their respected Houses, and in going to and returning from the same.” This immunity, though limited, protects legislators from arrest for actions for which ordinary citizens could be prosecuted. This limited immunity does not put them “above” the law, since it is the law itself that provides the immunity.

Judges, too, are immunized from not only from criminal prosecution, but also from civil liability for actions taken within their judicial authority. This is how the Supreme Court put it in Stump v. Sparkman (in which a young woman sued the circuit judge who had tricked her into being involuntarily sterilized by misinforming her that it was an appendectomy!): “The governing principle of law is well established, and is not questioned by the parties. As early as 1872, the court recognized that it was ‘a general principle of the highest importance to the proper administration of justice that a judicial officer, in exercising the authority vested in him, [should] be free to act upon his own convictions, without apprehension of personal consequences to himself.’” Continue reading “No one is above the law”