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opinion S UP REME CO U R T BY PHILIP SLAYTON Canadian style Why shouldn't a Supreme Court appointment require parliamentary confirmation? Picking the next justice, A ppointing a judge of the Su- preme Court of Canada is one of the most important things a prime minister does. Many argue that the process should be a great deal more thorough and public, and should include intensive parliamen- tary scrutiny of a candidate. After all, say these commentators, judges are ap- pointed and not elected, serve until age 75, and, since the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, wield great power; it is essential that we know who these people are and what they believe. Others (the Canadian Bar Association, for example) have taken the position that parliamen- tary review of candidates would embar- rass those candidates, politicize the ap- pointment process, and compromise the independence of judges. This debate has simmered for years. A powerfully argued and highly praised new book on how U.S. Supreme Court judges are chosen should give Ca- nadians pause for thought. In The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process, Christopher Eis- gruber, provost of Princeton University, former law professor at New York Uni- versity, and former law clerk to U.S. Su- preme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, argues that Americans need "a better way to talk about Supreme Court ap- pointments, and they need it now, before any president nominates the court's next justice." The U.S. appointments process, says Eisgruber, is broken. In particular, in spite of gruelling hours of question- ing in Senate confirmation hearings, the public learns little about the nominees and their judicial philosophies. Surely, what is true in the United States is even truer in Canada, where there are no "gruelling hours of questioning", and the public knows virtually nothing about those appointed to the Supreme Court. Make no mistake, judicial philosophy matters. Eisgruber writes that a judge's judicial philosophy is about "when and why it is beneficial for judges to impose their own controversial judgments about constitutional meaning on legislators and other elected officials." He argues that "how judges interpret the Consti- tution's abstract principles will depend on two kinds of convictions: their ideo- logical convictions and their procedural convictions, including their convictions about the proper role of courts within the American political system. Together, these convictions define a judicial phi- losophy." Judicial philosophy describes www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com FEBRU AR Y 2008 27 HUAN TRAN