The invocation of absolute immunity is not without precedent.
Under the court's precedents, prosecutors themselves have absolute immunity for a decision to prosecute, meaning that such suits must be brought against the officials who influenced the prosecutor to bring the case.
In 1982 the supreme court gave Richard Nixon "absolute immunity" to prosecution for most kinds of crimes committed while in office, setting a precedent for administrations to come.
Nishida drew upon such Buddhist and Daoist precedents in formulating his critique of substantialist metaphysics and his notion of absolute nothingness as an all-encompassing, ultimate frame of reference that is creative yet not transcendent to the world.
Given this precedent, it is not surprising that, last month, the court also refused to establish an absolute right to assisted suicide, especially since the right it had been asked to rule on was very broadly defined.
The Constitutions made the Kingdom of Sicily an absolute monarchy, the first centralized state in Europe to emerge from feudalism; it also set a precedent for the primacy of written law.
The idea, at its core, was that absolute monarchs should stick together against the region's revolutionary upheaval: real democratization in Morocco could create a dangerous precedent.
Supreme Court precedent and common sense also tell us that no principle, even one as cherished as religious freedom, is absolute.
