While the U.S. Supreme Court was issuing rulings through June, the Commonwealth’s Supreme Judicial Court made its own rulings with a new Chief Justice, Kimberly S. Budd, who was appointed late last year.
GBH’s legal analyst and Northeastern law professor Daniel Medwed joined Sean Corcoran on Morning Edition to discuss the legal context for the standoff on I-95 over the weekend as well as the first few rulings out of the new Supreme Judicial Court.
Corcoran started off by asking Medwed about the group involved in the armed standoff on the I-95, the Rise of the Moors, a Black sovereign citizen group. They faced arraignments Tuesday morning.
Historically, Medwed said, legal defenses that rely on claiming laws or constitutional principles don’t apply to particular groups have been “uniformly rejected” by the courts over the last several decades.
“The gist of the claim is maybe there's a treaty or some other exemption that applies to a particular group,” Medwed said. “That's a very strained and selective interpretation of the law, and it basically rejects what's called the supremacy clause — Article Six, Clause Two of our Constitution — which says that federal law is supreme. So I think, without necessarily going into the weeds too much, that it probably doesn't have much merit.”
On the SJC, Medwed turned his attention to the court’s composition rather than few rulings that it’s issued so far.
“Because of an odd confluence of retirements and the tragic, untimely death of Chief Justice Ralph Gants in 2020, Charlie Baker had an unprecedented chance — a really, virtually unprecedented chance — to give the court a complete makeover,” Medwed said. “This entire court turned over in less than five years. But it's going to be intact for almost another decade.”
Justices have to retire at age 70, he said, making it unlikely any new justices will be appointed to the court before 2029.
“Appointing youthful judges has been part of the Republican playbook nationally for years, dating back at least to the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court back in the aughts,” Medwed said.
Baker remade the court into not just a younger but a more racially diverse cohort, Medwed said. Three of the seven justices are people of color.
The judges’ centrism and pragmatism, too, reflects Baker’s own values, he added.
“This court isn't full of flamethrowers, full of radicals,” Medwed said, saying that the albeit few cases that this court has seen so far show some signs of “unanimity” and “centrism.”
WATCH: Medwed on Baker’s overhaul of the Massachusetts’ highest court
