Please take a moment and think back to our discussion of the role(s) of judges in the legal system throughout the course of the semester, then take a look at the following excerpt from an article by Justice Scalia taken from a law review article published in 1989. There is a link to the entire article (which is not long at all, less than two pages at the most) which you are welcome to read if you would like. After you read the excerpt, and the article if you choose to, please take a minute and recall the countermajoritarian difficulty. What does this difficulty refer to (give me a definition). Do you think the fact that we have federal judges whose role in our government is to interpret and apply the Constitution something that fundamentally promotes or prevents the equal treatment under the law of everyone that Justice Scalia mentions below?

Justice Antonin Scalia: The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules - 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1175, 1175-81 (1989) To begin with, the value of perfection in judicial decisions should not be overrated. To achieve what is, from the standpoint of the substantive policies involved, the "perfect\" answer is nice -- but it is just one of a number of competing values. And one of the most substantial of those competing values, which often contradicts the search for perfection, is the appearance of equal treatment. As a motivating force of the human spirit, that value cannot be overestimated. Parents know that children will accept quite readily all sorts of arbitrary substantive dispositions -- no television in the afternoon, or no television in the evening, or even no television at all. But try to let one brother or sister watch television when the others do not, and you will feel the fury of the fundamental sense of justice unleashed. ... And the trouble with the discretion-conferring approach to judicial law making is that it does not satisfy this sense of justice very well. When a case is accorded a different disposition from an earlier one, it is important, if the system of justice is to be respected, not only that the later case be different, but that it be seen to be so. When one is dealing, as my Court often is, with issues so heartfelt that they are believed by one side or the other to be resolved by the Constitution itself, it does not greatly appeal to one's sense of justice to say: "Well, that earlier case had nine factors, this one has nine plus one." Much better, even at the expense of the mild substantive distortion that any generalization introduces, to have a clear, previously enunciated rule that one can point to in explanation of the decision