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November 11, 2009
Judicial Review of Atlantic Yards Corruption: Laws Should Not Be A "Dead Letter"
Noticing New York
Michael D.D. White tours several hundred years of the history of judicial thought to put Atlantic Yards in context.
Hamilton’s quote: “Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation” is from the Federalist Papers No. 22, the Federalist Papers being those collected newspaper articles in which Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay pseudonymously argued why the Constitution and its incorporated principles should be adopted. (All of the Federalist Papers were addressed “To the People of the State of New York,” New York being Hamilton’s home state.) We were thinking about this quote in regard to the proposed Atlantic Yards megadevelopment and the various litigations that have been brought to stop it. We have been thinking of the quote in relation to the obligation of the courts to stand up and assume their responsibility to act like courts and give meaning and effect to the law by stopping Atlantic Yards.
We have previously written about the increasing predilection of public development officials to disregard laws for political motivations, encouraged by the feeling that they can do so with impunity. We have also written about how whatever initial doubt might once have existed about their support of Atlantic Yards, public officials such as Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson have long since by their own actions outed the truth that their support for the megadevelopment is corrupt, a commitment to a wired deal abusing eminent domain to give developer Forest City Ratner a no-bid mega-monopoly on a swath of valuable Brooklyn real estate, no matter the harm or absence of public benefit. Laws and fundamental rights are clearly being violated: The only question is whether the courts will let those laws become Hamilton’s “dead letter” by deferring to a fictional version of reality conjured up by governmental officials wherein by pretense and pretext those government officials feign that they have not violated the law and all its basic principles.
If the courts supinely succumb to whatever manufactured fictions public officials trump up as a pretext to steal private property through eminent domain abuse then they have, in essence, abdicated their function out of existence and we are left, for all intents and purposes, without courts or law.
Posted by eric at November 11, 2009 10:11 AM