New Jersey election law?

[James Maule]

>>> isomin at FAS.HARVARD.EDU 10/03/02 04:13AM >>> writes

The NJ case is different because here the court openly admits that it
is
going against the text of the legislature's statute and using a purely
judicial power to  do so. In general, I am suspicious of using
equitable
powers to trump the plain text of a statute. Part of the point of a
statutory text is precisely to decide the "equities" of the matter
being
legislated on.


The New Jersey Supreme Court frequently ignores statutory language, and
sometimes does not explain or clearly articulate that it is doing so. In
the area of wills and trusts, it almost eagerly sets aside statutory
requirements when "reforming" the document. In one case, it essentially
rewrote the will to be what it decided the decedent would have done
(based on the testimony of the beneficiaries who stood to gain if the
will were so rewritten) because the decedent had not bothered to change
his will to reflect developments in the tax law and in his family
situation. Of course, the result was equitable for the beneficiaries who
didn't like the will as written, but it couldn't have been all that fair
for those who benefitted under the will as written. The court
essentially said that the will had to reflect what it considered to be
just. Perhaps they made use of the guy with the TV show who claims to
contact folks in the afterlife?

So a person who executes a will probated in New Jersey just doesn't
quite know what really is going to happen when he or she dies. One
wonders if the next step is an opinion that holds "when a person dies
his or her property is distributed as the New Jersey Supreme Court
decides."





Jim Maule
Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law
Villanova PA 19085
maule at law.villanova.edu
http://vls.law.vill.edu/prof/maule
President, TaxJEM Inc (computer assisted tax law instruction)
(www.taxjem.com)
Publisher, JEMBook Publishing Co. (www.jembook.com)
Owner/Developer, TaxCruncherPro (www.taxcruncherpro.com)
Maule Family Archivist & Genealogist (www.maulefamily.com)