(The Ed Mosca Blog) “”Judge (John) Lewis’ decision in the Duncan case (Duncan v State of New Hampshire) is a paradigmatic example of judicial activism, or political judging. Essentially, what political judging involves is reasoning backwards from a political result that the judge wants to achieve. Here, the political result was to prevent application of the education tax credit law, because those credits are used to defray tuition to private schools, and the Left opposes making it easier for low and middle-class children to attend private schools.
How do we know it was political judging? Well, from reading the decision.
Lewis began with the “legislative history,” of the education tax credit law, which is exactly the opposite of how a statute is supposed to be interpreted under New Hampshire Supreme Court precedent ( “Unless we find statutory language to be ambiguous, we will not examine legislative history.” Clare v. Town of Hudson, 160 N.H. 378, 384-85 (2010).) What’s even more unorthodox is that Lewis used his “analysis” of the legislative history to emphasize the minority report, which of course was opposed to the law.””
Read the whole thing here.
