Are you sick of deTocqueville yet? I'm not!

I love the Judicial Committee(JC). I've said before that I didn't think the school could work without it and last week I read chap. 6, Judicial Power in the US and Its influence on American Society. I've decided to apply some of his thoughts to JC and see if holds up as a legitimate judicial power.

First he describes three characteristics of of the ordinary functions of judicial power:
1)Arbitration
2)It pronounces on special cases and not upon general principles
3)It can act only when it is called upon

So let's look at how JC functions.
Arbitration-definitely and I think effectively JC is really both a criminal and a civil court rolled up into one. I mean technically people are written up for violating a rule but some of the rules are written in a way to find a neutral way to tell someone that they are making you unhappy. Bullying behavior for example. If a third party observes bullying and writes it up then it feels more like a criminal charge with guilt or innocence to be determined but if a kid writes up another kid for bullying then JC is definitely the arbitrator between the two parties.

It pronounces on special cases and not upon general principles.- This is also true for JC. DeT also talks about how if a judge happens to make a decision that involve ruling on a general principle as a result he is still within his powers. I don't know if that happens in JC. I'm going to have to ask a staff if JC has ever recommended that a law be changed based on a case that they encountered. However, I'm pretty sure nobody has ever written up a law and asked JC to rule whether or not it is valid.

It can act only when called upon to do so.-Des will complain about people and I suggest writing them up which he doesn't do and I explain that if you can't solve it yourself JC is there to help you but they can't help you if they don't know about it. (It's funny,Amelia has had to learn moderation in the opposite direction, she was like the sheriff for a while. ) So JC can not go looking for problems to solve and even the people serving on it cannot sentence someone or refer something to school meeting just because they know it has occurred, they would still have to formally write it up.

So I think JC passes. The only thing that would make it more European(of the 1830's anyway) than American depends on whether or not it has the power to declare a rule invalid based on a larger law(American Judges hold everything up to the constitiution as the first law of the land, if a law contradicts the constitution it is invalid). I think the political power of JC is more European, it's scope is more limited.