Christie on Courts and the Search for Ultimate Moral and Political Truth

George C. Christie, Duke University School of Law, has published Some Reasons Courts Have Become Active Participants in the Search for Ultimate Moral and Political Truth in Le droit compare et.../ Comparative Law and... (A. Albsrian and O. Moreteau eds., Presses Universitaires d'Aix-Marseille, 2015). Here is the abstract.

This short essay was prompted by the increasing delegation to courts of the responsibility for deciding what are basically moral questions, such as in litigation involving human rights conventions, as well as the responsibility for deciding basic issues of social policy with at best only the most general guidelines to guide their exercise of judicial discretion. The essay discusses some of the reasons for this delegation of authority and briefly describes how courts have struggled to meet this obligation without transcending accepted notions governing the limits of judicial discretion.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.