Jason Samuel as Judge Poser

Law professors who think they understand the law

A co-blogger, Sean, posted on a letter to Senators Spector and Leahy signed by 160 law professors that opposes Judge Roberts' nomination.  I suggest you read his post.

TrueMarriage.net

I'd like to bring to your attention this new site: TrueMarriage.net - Marriage Through Contract.  The Executive Director and Founder was a professor of mine in my first year of law school. 

Can you say that...and mean it?

Cindy Sheehan, the woman who lost her soldier son in Iraq, continues her protest at the gates of the Western White Hose.  Story.

"We can be proud of our soldiers and ashamed of our government at the same time," said Tammara Rosenleaf, whose husband is stationed at Fort Hood and is to be deployed to Iraq this fall.

Can you say that?  Surely.  But can you say that while not contradicting yourself or, in the least, sending mixed messages?  I don't believe so.

What does being proud of our soldiers mean?  If we take proud to mean  "[f]eling pleasurable satisfaction over an act," then to be proud of someone may easily mean feeling pleasurable satisfaction from an act of another.  So, when a parent says that she is proud of her son, she means that she's pleasantly satisfied with some act of her son. Perhaps she means her son's grades, or some other achievement of his.  To be proud of of our soldiers means experiencing a pleasurable satisfaction over an act they've done.  It's a reasonable stretch to equate being proud in this sense to an act the soldiers are doing (as opposed to an act they did).

The control and command structure of our armed forces (that is our soldiers) is a responsive one.  It responds to dictates from its commander-in-chief, the president of the United States.  How then could one be proud of our soldiers, but ashamed of our president, the soldier's top commander?  What I do believe the commenter meant was not 'government,' but president.  These protesters are camped out at the Western White House, not 1 First Street, NE.  Unless they're ashamed of the executive in another province of its power (like the regulation of food and drugs), being ashamed at the president's war effort undermines their support for the troops. 

Because you're a Catholic, you must be a "living Constitutionalist"

In a Boston Globe piece, Faithful Interpretations, Drake Bennett attempts to popularize Sanford V. Levinson's taxonomy relating a jurist's religiosity to his interpretive method.  Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin,  "argues that the tenets of Catholicism need not be seen merely as a competing set of dictates to be reconciled with constitutional law on fiercely contested issues like abortion, capital punishment, and sodomy."  [Der.]" Instead, he proposes using Catholic ideas about tradition and scripture as a lens through which to examine American attitudes about the Constitution, a founding document that has been venerated and fought over in much the same way that Catholics and Protestants have fought over the Bible." 

Those couple sentences peaked my interest, indeed.  I thought I'd be reading how a jurist's personal beliefs have some bearing on his interpretive method.  While not necessarily the case, I thought, perhaps, there's some correlative relationship between Originalists and Catholicism (err, Thomas and Scalia).  Instead, either though the sloppiness of the author or Levinson, the whole idea of looking to the jurist's religion to explain his interpretive method now seems like a sloppy way to explain what could be an interesting phenomenon.  Levinson's exercise can be reduced to psychologizing jurist's behavior. 

Robert P. George, a juristprudent scholar at Princeton, was quoted in the piece, but only limitedly.  I wish we could have read more of what he had to say.  There's no doubt to me that he had more to say on the topic given his extensive work in this area.  The little Bennett quotes from him, I believe, completely undermines Levinson's project.  Levinson is committing a categorical error really.  The institutions of American law and the Catholic Church are entirely distinguishable.  For that reason, George says, Levinson's project fails.  For it cannot explain how a jurist's religious belief bears on his interpretive method.

Levinson--or Bennett--admits so much in the end: "Levinson readily admits his contrast between legal ''catholics" and ''protestants" is more of a heuristic than ''a hard-and-fast scientific truth." He makes no claim that knowing how a judge spends his Sundays will explain his rulings."

Distinguishing Clinton's Appointees from Bush's

T. More at Ex Post has this to say:

So I will buy that Clinton did not, by and large, appoint terribly left wing people to the judiciary. But I do not accept that he did so because virtue demanded it: he did so because the mainstream is well to the "right" of Senators Schumer and Kennedy, and he was well to the right of them most of the time as well.

Read the post.

Sharon's Condemnation

Link: The Right Coast.

    Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, called the shootings "a reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist who sought to attack innocent Israeli citizens." Not the response one sees from the Palestinians after their terrorism.

Interested in some legal gossip?

I hope you interpret my title of this post to mean gossip about things legal and not that the gossip itself is legal (that is, as opposed to being illegal).

In any event, I'd like to pass along the most recent post of A3G, the author of Underneath Their Robes: The Roberts Nomination: The Senate's Got Questions, He's Got Answers.

Mark Levin makes a good point

Mark Levin makes this point.  I agree.

Link: Bench Memos on National Review Online.

We've discussed at length what should or should not be asked John Roberts, and how he should or should not answer. What bothers me about this nomination is that conservative senators and commentators (not here) are blowing a great opportunity to engage the Left on judicial philosophy. We should engage on the commerce, religion and takings clauses. We should engage on so-called privacy rights and abortion. We should challenge the Left's equal protection jurisprudence (including, in my view, the inevitable decision on same-sex marriage) and Congress's legitimate power to reduce (or expand) judicial jurisdiction. Instead, conservative senators and commentators are surrendering the field with defensive and bureaucratic arguments. We should debate the proper role of the Court, not side-step it. The Court is too powerful and the justices are out of control. From partial birth abortion and eminent domain to foreign law and due process rights for unalwful enemy combatants, the public stands with us.

Kennedy Flip-Flops on Quizzing High Court Nominees -- 07/28/2005

Link: Kennedy Flip-Flops on Quizzing High Court Nominees -- 07/28/2005.

"We have to respect that any nominee to the Supreme Court would have to defer any comments on any matters, which are either before the court or very likely to be before the court," Kennedy said during a 1967 press conference. "This has been a procedure which has been followed in the past and is one which I think is based upon sound legal precedent." See Video

How To Invest Like a Supreme Court Justice - What John Roberts' portfolio reveals about his character. By Henry Blodget

Link: How To Invest Like a Supreme Court Justice - What John Roberts' portfolio reveals about his character. By Henry Blodget.

On the whole, Roberts' investment choices suggest that his financial character is much like his legal one. In investing, he tends to accept prevailing conventional wisdom—which, in the case of the financial markets, often changes and is often wrong—and to apply it with above-average competence.

(HT Acton Power Blog)