Liberty is for me…

Wonderful language from the U.S. Supreme Court in today’s decision in Indiana v. Edwards:

As I have explained, I would not adopt an approach to the right of self-representation that we have squarely rejected for other rights-allowing courts to disregard the right when doing so serves the purposes for which the right was intended. But if I were to adopt such an approach, I would remain in dissent, because I believe the Court’s assessment of the purposes of the right of self-representation is inaccurate to boot. While there is little doubt that preserving individual “ ‘dignity’ ” (to which the Court refers), ante, at 11, is paramount among those purposes, there is equally little doubt that the loss of “dignity” the right is designed to prevent is not the defendant’s making a fool of himself by presenting an amateurish or even incoherent defense. Rather, the dignity at issue is the supreme human dignity of being master of one’s fate rather than a ward of the State-the dignity of individual choice. Faretta explained that the Sixth Amendment’s counsel clause should not be invoked to impair “ ‘the exercise of [the defendant’s] free choice’ ” to dispense with the right, 422 U. S., at 815 (quoting Adams, 317 U. S., at 280); for “whatever else may be said of those who wrote the Bill of Rights, surely there can be no doubt that they understood the inestimable worth of free choice,” 422 U. S., at 833-834.

Now if only our courts — particularly this one — would acknowledge this “inestimable worth of free choice” when it comes to economic liberty. As I’ve written on this blog before, our rights are only abitrarily protected by the courts and it depends on the type of review the courts choose to use. Unfortunately for economic liberty, the courts have decided on their own to afford it the lowest standard of review and, therefore, the least possible protection. Last week this issue was discussed in an op-ed in the Baltimore Examiner that Liberty Girl helped edit:

In the past few decades, there has been a nationwide explosion of protectionist regulations in the United States. In 1981, there were about 80 occupations with such barriers to entry; today there are more than 1,000.

Politicians should not be able to get away with passing these laws, but since the 1870s courts have largely turned a blind eye, pretending as if such regulations exist for legitimate purposes. The result has been ludicrous justifications for protectionism, as in licensing florists is OK because it protects the public against “infected dirt.”

Thankfully, after many years of neglect, courts are finally waking up…. [They] play a vital role in protecting fundamental rights. As William Mellor and Robert Levy write in their new book, “The Dirty Dozen,” “Like all rights, the right to earn an honest living is meaningful only if it can be enforced and protected.”

Indiana v. Edwards, No. 07-208, slip op at 8 (Scalia, J. dissenting), available here.