We've heard it dozens of times — claims of "activist" courts usurping the meaning and impact of laws passed by Congress or various state legislatures.
While those claims are usually nothing more than spin doctoring, Michigan had for years been the example that proved the claim.
From 1999, when Republican justices Steven Markman and Robert Young were appointed to the Michigan Supreme Court by former Gov. John Engler (he appointed Justice Maura Corrigan to the Appeals Court in 1992 and she joined the top court in 1999), until 2008, when voters booted chief Justice Clifford Taylor (a 1997 Engler appointee), the so-called "Gang of Four" or "Engler Majority" showed a brazen disdain for decades of precedents and the rights of common citizens to access the courts.
Now, with Justice Betty Weaver (a Republican) often providing the fourth vote, the court is undoing some of the most egregious rulings of the past decade and, as Justice Michael Cavanagh wrote in a recent opinion, "restoring, not departing from, the fabric of the law and this court's fidelity to the Michigan Constitution."
Perhaps the most significant change applies indirectly to one of the court's most outrageous decisions — the 2007 ruling that undid the underpinnings of Michigan's seminal Environmental Protection Act, which had been the law of the land for 37 years.
In the now-infamous Nestlé Waters North America case, the court ruled that the 1970 Environmental Protection Act wording, "The attorney general or any person (italics added) may" sue to protect "the air, water, and other natural resources ... from pollution, impairment, or destruction," didn't actually mean any person. The court said only those who could prove personal harm from such pollution could sue.
It hardly could have been more flagrant. The Legislature had clearly given any person — which of course meant every person — the right and, indeed, the obligation, to protect Michigan's most precious assets: "the air, water, and other natural resources ..."
It was a call to arms to protect what Michigan held most dear.
Earlier this month, in an unrelated case, the high court overturned a 2001 Gang of Four decision and loosened the standard for filing some civil lawsuits, which also should undo the Environmental Protection Act prohibition.
The court also has returned to prior precedent in injury lawsuits; now, as before, the court says the law "merely requires that a person's general ability to lead his or her normal life (after an accident) has been affected, not destroyed," an outrageous standard that only the insurance industry embraced.
The court also ruled in favor of former Elmwood Township Supervisor Derith Smith, reversing a Court of Appeals ruling that Donald Barrows and John Stanek did not act with actual malice when they sent a negative mailing about Smith to township residents.
This is all about restoring access to and belief in the courts and, through them, justice.
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