Donald M. Fenton
In January 1776, months before the Continental Congress declared independence, an immigrant pamphleteer named Thomas Paine compressed the entire case for American self-government into a slim, plain-spoken pamphlet.
“Common Sense” did not merely argue for separation from Britain; it named the principle that would have to replace a king. “So far as we approve of monarchy,” Paine wrote, “in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
Six months later, in July 1776, the Declaration of Independence made it official — all are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, and governed only by the consent of the governed. Paine supplied the spark; the Declaration supplied the covenant. But a covenant is only words until someone is willing, day after day, to make the law actually reign.
We tend to picture the guardians of that covenant in the marble buildings of Washington. Yet most Americans will never argue before the Supreme Court. We meet the promise of 1776 in far humbler rooms — a traffic docket, a sentencing hearing, a district courtroom in a county seat. The economist and former labor secretary Robert Reich has argued that a democracy survives only on commitments its citizens honor even when they are inconvenient: respect for the rule of law in spirit as well as letter, protection of independent institutions, and the understanding that no one — however powerful — stands above the law. In “The Common Good,” Reich warns that when winning at any cost replaces those commitments, the whole civic fabric frays.
Chief Justice John Roberts once distilled the ideal into a single sentence: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges.” What we have, he insisted, are judges striving to do equal justice to whoever appears before them.
I do not write as a detached observer. I write as a man who has been, in the same season of life, both saint and sinner — and who has met the law from the gallery and from the defendant’s chair alike.
The saint, such as he is: this year I became a certified paralegal and an honored graduate — featured at the 2026 commencement — of the distinguished, ABA-approved paralegal-studies program led by Sara Bowman and Robert Long at Oakland Community College’s Orchard Ridge campus in Farmington Hills.
Over the past two years I have published three articles in The Detroit Legal News and The Oakland County Legal News, and I have taken my seat at the Oakland County Bar Association’s “Boot Camp” for new lawyers and paralegals. I have spent this chapter of my life studying the law with something close to reverence.
The sinner is a plainer story. In 2025 I was a tourist in Cadillac, up north for the skiing — I am an active skier and a senior-division Alpine slalom winner — when I hoisted a few too many brews and made the worst decision a person can make with car keys in his pocket. I tried to drive back to my hotel. I earned my first and only OWI.
And so I stood before the Honorable Corey Wiggins of the 84th District Court in Cadillac. He was not lenient — the law is not lenient about a car driven drunk, nor should it be. But he was scrupulously, proportionately fair. He read the situation, weighed the evidence, balanced the interest of the state against the rights of the individual, and rendered judgment by the book — no lighter for my credentials, no heavier for my folly. My own attorney afterward described him as a level-headed judge who called it exactly as the law required. In that courtroom I experienced, as a defendant, the very principle I had studied as a student: that the law is king, that no man is above it, and that every person — the erring tourist emphatically included — is entitled to equal treatment and equal protection under it. For teaching me that lesson from the bench rather than from a book, Judge Wiggins is my hero.
His path lends weight to that fairness. Before Governor Whitmer appointed him in 2025, Wiggins was Wexford County’s elected prosecutor, and before that a defense attorney in his own firm — he has stood at every table in the courtroom. A longtime volunteer with the Cadillac Area YMCA and Silent Observer, he is the kind of judge most Americans actually encounter: local, accessible, and quietly determined to get it right.
I met my second hero in a very different setting. At that Oakland County Bar Association Boot Camp, one of the presenters was the Honorable Michael Warren, who has sat on Oakland County’s Sixth Judicial Circuit Court since 2002 and presided over hundreds of jury trials. I came away equally impressed—by his presentations, his books, and a command of constitutional law that is rare on any bench. Judge Warren has spent decades teaching the country why its founding principles still matter: in 2009, with his 10-year-old daughter Leah, he co-founded Patriot Week, now marked across the nation; he teaches constitutional law, hosts a civics podcast, and has written a line-by-line study of the Declaration of Independence — the very document whose promises he applies from the bench. Here is a jurist who understands that equal justice under law is not a slogan but a discipline.
Notice something about these two men. One was placed on the bench by a Republican governor, the other by a Democrat. That is not an accident of my admiration; it is the point. The rule of law is the property of no party. It is the common inheritance Paine described — the king we chose instead of a king — and it works the same for the powerful and the powerless, the celebrated and the ashamed.
These are my personal heroes in the judicial branch of our tripartite system — the branch that, on its best days, holds the other two to the same law it held me to on my worst. Two hundred and fifty years after Paine, the law is king only because people are willing to make it so — not once, in a famous document, but every ordinary morning, in courthouses most of us drive past without a second thought. I know, because one of them held me to it. And I am grateful.
—————
Donald M. Fenton is a certified paralegal and consulting engineer in southeastern Michigan. Quotations from Thomas Paine are drawn from Common Sense (1776); the founding promises referenced are from the Declaration of Independence (1776). The framework of the rule of law and the common good draws on Robert B. Reich, The Common Good (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018). The remark by Chief Justice John Roberts is from his November 2018 public statement. The account of the author’s case reflects his own recollection.
“Common Sense” did not merely argue for separation from Britain; it named the principle that would have to replace a king. “So far as we approve of monarchy,” Paine wrote, “in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
Six months later, in July 1776, the Declaration of Independence made it official — all are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights, and governed only by the consent of the governed. Paine supplied the spark; the Declaration supplied the covenant. But a covenant is only words until someone is willing, day after day, to make the law actually reign.
We tend to picture the guardians of that covenant in the marble buildings of Washington. Yet most Americans will never argue before the Supreme Court. We meet the promise of 1776 in far humbler rooms — a traffic docket, a sentencing hearing, a district courtroom in a county seat. The economist and former labor secretary Robert Reich has argued that a democracy survives only on commitments its citizens honor even when they are inconvenient: respect for the rule of law in spirit as well as letter, protection of independent institutions, and the understanding that no one — however powerful — stands above the law. In “The Common Good,” Reich warns that when winning at any cost replaces those commitments, the whole civic fabric frays.
Chief Justice John Roberts once distilled the ideal into a single sentence: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges.” What we have, he insisted, are judges striving to do equal justice to whoever appears before them.
I do not write as a detached observer. I write as a man who has been, in the same season of life, both saint and sinner — and who has met the law from the gallery and from the defendant’s chair alike.
The saint, such as he is: this year I became a certified paralegal and an honored graduate — featured at the 2026 commencement — of the distinguished, ABA-approved paralegal-studies program led by Sara Bowman and Robert Long at Oakland Community College’s Orchard Ridge campus in Farmington Hills.
Over the past two years I have published three articles in The Detroit Legal News and The Oakland County Legal News, and I have taken my seat at the Oakland County Bar Association’s “Boot Camp” for new lawyers and paralegals. I have spent this chapter of my life studying the law with something close to reverence.
The sinner is a plainer story. In 2025 I was a tourist in Cadillac, up north for the skiing — I am an active skier and a senior-division Alpine slalom winner — when I hoisted a few too many brews and made the worst decision a person can make with car keys in his pocket. I tried to drive back to my hotel. I earned my first and only OWI.
And so I stood before the Honorable Corey Wiggins of the 84th District Court in Cadillac. He was not lenient — the law is not lenient about a car driven drunk, nor should it be. But he was scrupulously, proportionately fair. He read the situation, weighed the evidence, balanced the interest of the state against the rights of the individual, and rendered judgment by the book — no lighter for my credentials, no heavier for my folly. My own attorney afterward described him as a level-headed judge who called it exactly as the law required. In that courtroom I experienced, as a defendant, the very principle I had studied as a student: that the law is king, that no man is above it, and that every person — the erring tourist emphatically included — is entitled to equal treatment and equal protection under it. For teaching me that lesson from the bench rather than from a book, Judge Wiggins is my hero.
His path lends weight to that fairness. Before Governor Whitmer appointed him in 2025, Wiggins was Wexford County’s elected prosecutor, and before that a defense attorney in his own firm — he has stood at every table in the courtroom. A longtime volunteer with the Cadillac Area YMCA and Silent Observer, he is the kind of judge most Americans actually encounter: local, accessible, and quietly determined to get it right.
I met my second hero in a very different setting. At that Oakland County Bar Association Boot Camp, one of the presenters was the Honorable Michael Warren, who has sat on Oakland County’s Sixth Judicial Circuit Court since 2002 and presided over hundreds of jury trials. I came away equally impressed—by his presentations, his books, and a command of constitutional law that is rare on any bench. Judge Warren has spent decades teaching the country why its founding principles still matter: in 2009, with his 10-year-old daughter Leah, he co-founded Patriot Week, now marked across the nation; he teaches constitutional law, hosts a civics podcast, and has written a line-by-line study of the Declaration of Independence — the very document whose promises he applies from the bench. Here is a jurist who understands that equal justice under law is not a slogan but a discipline.
Notice something about these two men. One was placed on the bench by a Republican governor, the other by a Democrat. That is not an accident of my admiration; it is the point. The rule of law is the property of no party. It is the common inheritance Paine described — the king we chose instead of a king — and it works the same for the powerful and the powerless, the celebrated and the ashamed.
These are my personal heroes in the judicial branch of our tripartite system — the branch that, on its best days, holds the other two to the same law it held me to on my worst. Two hundred and fifty years after Paine, the law is king only because people are willing to make it so — not once, in a famous document, but every ordinary morning, in courthouses most of us drive past without a second thought. I know, because one of them held me to it. And I am grateful.
—————
Donald M. Fenton is a certified paralegal and consulting engineer in southeastern Michigan. Quotations from Thomas Paine are drawn from Common Sense (1776); the founding promises referenced are from the Declaration of Independence (1776). The framework of the rule of law and the common good draws on Robert B. Reich, The Common Good (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018). The remark by Chief Justice John Roberts is from his November 2018 public statement. The account of the author’s case reflects his own recollection.
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