Opinion ID: 1095462
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Value Judgments

Text: But the cry remains, it is wrong for a public officer, in this instance a legislator, to vote on appropriations that will ultimately be used in whole or in part to pay his salary. Here the argument steps outside permissible legal reasoning and enters the arena of value judgments. The argument proceeds not on the basis of what the law is or even what it is in the process of becoming, but what the lawyers wish it were notwithstanding the absence of language in Section 109 which may undergird that wish. The constitution makers, whom we presume familiar with the English language, could have written Section 109 so that a legislator was prohibited from voting on an appropriation from which his salary would ultimately be paid, but they didn't. So long as there exists between the legislator and his paycheck an independent authority, a buffer zone, if you will, which the legislature has no lawful power to invade or control, Section 109 fairly construed is simply not offended. In our system of law only value judgments [7] of a very special kind may inform judicial decisions. Those are the value judgments which have been incorporated into our law by the authority of some agency  constitutional convention, legislative, the judiciary, etc.  duly authorized in the premises. We cling to this fundamental proposition for the rather basic reason that people's value judgments differ, as the present cases make apparent. The value judgment that, a legally independent buffer zone notwithstanding, no legislator should be allowed to receive a salary traceable back to an appropriation approved by the body of which he is a member is simply not a value judgment which may be found within a fair reading of the language of our law. Certainly law is a purposeful enterprise subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules. See Warren County Board of Education v. Wilkinson, 500 So.2d 455, 460 (Miss. 1986). But we begin with the language of the rules and seek to divine purpose therefrom. The rule at issue, of course, is Section 109. To affirm we would have to turn this proposition upon its head and begin with a definition of purpose, inevitably a value judgment, and forge a rule to fit that purpose, whether our positive law contain such a rule or not. This I have always thought the essence of alegality which when practiced has been justly condemned by those familiar with our law. Yet in its stretching of the word and concept authorized to include funding, this is precisely what the majority opinion has done.