[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 77 (Friday, June 17, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 17, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
   TRIBUTE TO JUDGE WILLIAM J. ZLOCH, U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE, SOUTHERN 
                          DISTRICT OF FLORIDA

                                 ______


                           HON. PETER T. KING

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, June 17, 1994

  Mr. KING. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize and pay tribute to 
the Honorable William J. Zloch, a true student-athlete who has gone on 
to become an outstanding American jurist. At the suggestion of Prof. 
Charles Rice of the Notre Dame Law School, I want to take this 
opportunity to offer into the Record the remarks of Judge Zloch before 
the recent Law Day meeting of the Broward County, Florida Bar 
Association.
  As a graduate of Notre Dame Law School and a lifelong fan of the 
Fighting Irish football team, I can proudly report that William Zloch 
was the starting quarterback for the 1965 Notre Dame football squad 
which was ranked among the top 10 in the Nation. Bill Zloch went on 
from his gridiron triumphs to graduate from Notre Dame in 1966 and 
Notre Dame Law School in 1971. He also served his country as a naval 
officer in Vietnam.
  Mr. Speaker, the members of this institution should note that in his 
Law Day remarks, William J. Zloch demonstrates why he is a respected 
member of the Federal judiciary. I encourage my colleagues to take note 
of Judge Zloch's comments.

            Law Day Speech to Broward County Bar Association

       The annual celebration of Law Day provides us with an 
     opportunity to reflect on our United States Constitution and 
     its interpretation by our federal judicial system. In 
     reflecting on this point, I want to put a slightly different 
     perspective on what you may be accustomed to hearing. Isn't 
     the job of a judge to apply the Constitution, as written, 
     according to the intent of those who adopted it, rather than 
     according to his own view of what is useful or just? Didn't 
     Alexander Hamilton warn in The Federalist No. 78 that ``The 
     courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should 
     be disposed to exercise will instead of judgment the 
     consequence would equally be the substitution of their 
     pleasure to that of the legislative body.'' (emphasis in 
     original).
       Federal Judges are tasked with the administration of 
     justice and a debate has raged for thousands of years of 
     human experience as to what is justice, a debate which is 
     raging even today in our society. It is a debate which has 
     basically set forth two diametrically opposed views of what 
     justice is. On the one hand there is the view which 
     unfortunately has found its way, to a large extent, into our 
     society across the board, but also particularly among our 
     leaders in the law and justice profession, that justice is a 
     question of expedience.
       William James wrote more than fifty years ago in describing 
     his pragmatic philosophy that the truth, to put it briefly, 
     is merely the expedient to our way of thinking and that which 
     is right is merely the expedient to our way of behavior.
       This philosophy has been articulated very well more 
     recently by professors across the country who claim, wrongly 
     I believe, that we, as a society, no longer share unchanging 
     rational values. Nonetheless, they state, it is important 
     that we breathe into our corpus juris whatever values we 
     share today irrespective of whether we shared them yesterday, 
     irrespective of whether we share them tomorrow. This 
     philosophy would sever positive law from the unchanging 
     principles of the natural law and it is a recipe for 
     atrocities.
       This illustrates a tendency in our system of jurisprudence 
     to depart from the traditional concepts of natural law and to 
     accept and embrace concepts of utility; i.e., that which 
     works today is that which is good, that which is 
     technologically feasible is that which must be done. This is 
     a philosophy that holds that man's worth is measured only by 
     his utility to the material world around him. And, as a 
     corollary to this proposition, so are his habits.
       Opposed to that philosophy is the philosophy that justice 
     is something more than acquiescence to whatever may be the 
     social whim of the day. For the wind of favor that blows 
     today may very well turn into the wind of disfavor that 
     blows tomorrow. And justice ultimately is a question of 
     each and every one of us having preserved and protected 
     our fundamental rights. And justice, in turn, is dependent 
     upon each and every one of us being cognizant of our 
     authentic personhood, what it means to be a person, 
     because justice is essentially and ultimately a command of 
     love.
       The greater the influence or sovereignty over the affairs 
     of man one has, the greater humility one must bring to the 
     service of man. Our founding fathers in establishing that 
     each of us had certain inalienable rights did so, not out of 
     a burst of sudden and passing civility, but in recognition of 
     the fact that our nation and our form of government and our 
     system of laws was the end point of a bridge that spanned 
     thousands of years back to when God told the prophets, 
     ``Before I formed you in the womb I knew you * * *. I have 
     loved you with an everlasting love.'' (Jer. 1:5, 31:3).
       Translated, this means to me that all of us in the law and 
     justice profession must recognize and remember that our 
     personhood stems from our divine origin and our personhood 
     requires not only that we have recognized for us our 
     fundamental rights and duties but that we recognize our 
     duties to others.
       Today, our society is caught up in a parasitism of crime 
     which involves among other things organized narcotics 
     trafficking, pornography, child abuse, money laundering, 
     murder and a decline in morals of unprecedented magnitude and 
     scope. It is a crime wave and moral free fall that no one 
     person seems to have a grasp on and which we all tend to view 
     in the abstract sense. I think if we pause and reflect, we 
     can recognize that one of the reasons for this is that we, as 
     a society, have invited this crime wave and the moral free 
     fall in which society finds itself today. And we have invited 
     it in the sense that we have forgotten or are in danger of 
     forgetting what it is to be a human being or a human person, 
     because if we do not have an authentic definition of 
     personality we are not able to all to define what it is that 
     is good or harmful to our being and to our purpose. I suggest 
     to you that we as a society have been and presently are on a 
     course of conduct that continues to diminish the value of 
     dignity of life. Certainly, when you spend enough time 
     rationalizing acts that are clearly immoral, there then comes 
     a hardening of the heart, of the spirit, and we end up in a 
     moral free fall and facing unwarranted consequences.
       Dostoyevsky, in his book, Crime and Punishment, wrote of a 
     dream in which a child views a man beating his horse to 
     death. In literary circles this is referred to as ``The Dream 
     of the Suffering Horse,'' In this dream the protagonist is a 
     child. This horse was an old mare, gaunt and overworked, 
     owned by a man whose job it was to ferry goods to people in a 
     cart around St. Petersburg, Russia. While stopped in front of 
     a tavern, a group of drunken revelers came out of the tavern 
     and jumped into the cart. They demanded that the owner take 
     them away in the cart. At their encouragement and despite the 
     frantic struggling of the horse, the owner began beating the 
     horse to pull the load even though it was too heavy. The 
     child cried and asked his father to intervene and the father 
     said, ``It is none of our business.'' The horse was beaten to 
     death. When the horse died the child ran to it and 
     embraced it and wept over it.
       Dostoyevsky at the time that he wrote this novel was 
     criticized as being anti-intellectual. He was not. He was at 
     war with the theories of utilitarianism and social Darwinism 
     which were running amuck in Europe. Dostoyevsky says to us 
     that the man in the dream in killing the horse was actually 
     killing himself.
       It is my view that the horse represents the suffering of 
     the innocent. It represents, I think, in a contemporaneous 
     fashion, the suffering of our children in our society. 
     Children, who because we have in so many respects lost the 
     sense of our human identity and human dignity, are being 
     asked to carry, like that horse, a load that they cannot 
     bear. In condoning such action that destroys our children, we 
     in turn destroy ourselves.
       I submit that it is important to recognize that justice is 
     not a question of escapements. It is a question of that to 
     which we are all entitled as a matter of natural right. And 
     we will indeed, as a nation, rediscover and reaffirm our 
     respect for the law when we rediscover and reaffirm our 
     respect for ourselves as persons and the value and dignity of 
     life.
       We must keep in mind that the law comes from a higher law 
     giver. It is important for a coherent society to keep in mind 
     that God is the ultimate law giver and that the law should be 
     infused with a moral code which comes from God through the 
     natural law, through what the Declaration of Independence 
     called ``the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.''
       History has shown that when morals decline laws increase in 
     number. However, I submit that the law of itself is not 
     enough. You cannot do it simply with the law. The Lord's 
     Prayer has fifty-six words, the Gettysburg Address has two 
     hundred and fifty-six, the Ten Commandments have two hundred 
     and ninety-seven, and the Declaration of Independence has 
     three hundred words. Some laws that come out of Congress have 
     thousands and thousands of words.
       I think that indicates that the law of itself is not enough 
     and the law has to be infused with something else. As Thomas 
     Aquinas stated, it is impossible that the common good should 
     progress unless there is virtue in the citizens and 
     especially in those who administer the law.
       In concluding, let me remind you that in September 1789 
     when the 1st Congress approved the First Amendment to the 
     United States Constitution, they called upon the President of 
     the United States to declare a day of national prayer and 
     thanksgiving. As you also know, each session of the House of 
     Representatives opens with a prayer. In that spirit, I ask 
     you to pray to God for our country and pray to God for 
     guidance for judges and those who exercise offices of 
     leadership.
       Thank you.