Episode
The Golden Metwand
- Published
- Aug 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2484
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://jeffkellick.substack.com/p/the-golden-metwand
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Summary
78 Days, No Warrant — and Every Bit of It Was Legal A Pennsylvania game warden named Mark Gritzer walked onto 4,400 acres of posted private ground in Clearfield County — signs at the road, purple paint on the boundary trees, locked gates — and fixed a trail camera to a tree. He had no warrant and no probable cause. Developing probable cause was the point of the camera. It stayed there for 78 days. And every bit of it was authorized, in plain words, by two sections of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code that wrote the signs and the paint and the locks out of the law by name. On July 21, 2026, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reversed itself. All seven justices agreed that the court’s own 2007 decision in Commonwealth v. Russo was wrong and that posted private land is protected under Article I, Section 8 of the state constitution. Everyone I know cheered. I cheered. And then I sat down and thought about what had just happened — because judges had erased provisions of a statute passed by an elected legislature, and the reason they gave was that a law older than that statute stood above it. That is precisely the proposition Sir Edward Coke spent his life defending, and precisely the proposition Saturday’s skeptic warned us about. Coke told James the First that the law was the golden metwand, the measuring rod of gold by which the causes of subjects are measured. The image is exactly right about the law. It is entirely silent about the hand. This episode is about the hand. Along the way: why Pennsylvania is the state where the lazy version of the countermajoritarian objection collapses, since this court stands for partisan statewide election and faces retention votes. Why the open fields doctrine rests on a misread page of Blackstone — Justice Holmes claimed in 1924 th…