Je Recuse: The Disqualification of a Judge
![handle is hein.journals/louilr19 and id is 666 raw text is: Je Recuse!: The Disqualification of
a Judge
Ralph Slovenko*
0, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
- Shakespeare, Measure for Measure,
Act III, Scene ii, lines 251-2.
I. IN GENERAL
Socrates postulated that Four things belong to a judge: To
hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, to decide
impartially.' The well-advertised slogan through the ages of
the cold neutrality of an impartial judge'2 has given rise to the
belief that a judge must not be anti-anything.3 When, in 1956,
Jean-Paul Sartre in a letter to the New York Times expressed
his view that Morton Sobell was innocent of the charge of con-
spiracy to commit espionage, the United States Attorney in the
case replied to Sartre's letter with the sententious rebuke: Phi-
losophers should be careful not to substitute emotion and preju-
dice for true inquiry and objectivity.4
A judicial decision is a decision by a human being called a
judge. More often than not, it is forgotten that a judge is a
human being, and that, as a human being, his action is shaped
by his heredity and by his environment. Among those influences
which affect judicial decisions are the judge's education and
associations, his political and economic and social philosophy,
*Assistant Professor of Law, Tulane University.
1. Quoted, among many places, in Lazarus, In Memory of Charles A. O'Neill,
219 La. xxxix (1951) ; Yankwich, The Art of Being a Judge, 105 U. PA. L. REV.
374, 385 (1957).
2. This expression of Burke's is employed in State v. Bordelon, 141 La. 611,
75 So. 429 (1917). See also Palmer v. Atkinson, 116 Fla. 366, 156 So. 726
(1934).
3. See, e.g., Lummus, Our Heritage of Impartial Justice, 19 B.U.L. REV. 2
(1939) ; Pound, Justice According to Law, 13 COLirn. L. REV. 696, 710 (1912).
It was Blackstone's axiom that the judge is a mere passive oracle or mouth-
piece of a somewhat called Law, a sort of a speaking-tube through which Law
talks to the laity. Frank, Mr. Justice Holmes and Non-Euclidean Legal Thinking,
17 CORNELL L.Q. 568, 582 (1932).
4. Letter of Mr. Paul W. Williams, United States Attorney for the Southern
District of New York, to New York Times, June 26, 1956, p. 28, col. 6, in reply
to Sartre's letter of June 15, 1956.
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Je Recuse: The Disqualification of a Judge
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