Paul Kominers, an associate at the law firm Anderson & Kreiger LLP, has published Judge Day’s Case: A Historical Account of Commonwealth v. Harriman in the December issue of the Massachusetts Law Review. Mr Kominers describes Harriman, decided in 1883, as “the leading case on removal of judges by address in Massachusetts.” From the introduction:
In Harriman, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) decided it could not second-guess the removal of a judge from office “by address.” The opinion, a straightforward historical example of the “political question” doctrine, reads as an exercise in formal constitutional interpretation, but should be understood as a product of its particular historical context.
--Dan Ernst