September 3, 2005
The more-provocative labels hurled at John Roberts by the dozens of liberal groups opposing his nomination seem unlikely to stick, especially once the nation gets to know him through his televised confirmation testimony after Labor Day.
July 23, 2005
Judge John G. Roberts Jr. will "strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench," President Bush said Tuesday night in announcing his Supreme Court nominee. "Strict constructionist" was on the lips of many Bush-Roberts supporters confident that Roberts is no "judicial activist."
July 11, 2005
For an old ranching girl, you turned out pretty good," President George W. Bush told Sandra Day O'Connor when she spoke to the White House last week to say that she was retiring from the Supreme Court. The image of O'Connor as cowgirl is a powerful one, and she has done as much as anyone to foster it. In her chambers, decorated with Western rugs and paintings and artifacts, she served her...
July 9, 2005
The president's favorite judge had scornfully denounced as "illegitimate" dozens of the "most significant constitutional decisions of the past three decades," as well as others going back to the 1920s. He had excoriated "the modern, activist, liberal Supreme Court" for rulings that recognized rights to abortion, contraception, and other aspects of the "right to...
July 2, 2005
On June 27, as the Supreme Court ended its term amid rampant speculation about 80-year-old Chief Justice William Rehnquist's future, his 75-year-old colleague Sandra Day O'Connor was continuing to inch away from her "conservative" past.
May 21, 2005
Justice William Brennan Jr. was in an animated mood, even for him. It was May 27, 1987, toward the end of the Supreme Court's first term since Justice William Rehnquist's 1986 promotion to chief justice. The Senate vote had been 65-33, amid bitter attacks -- even charges of perjury -- from liberal groups.
February 26, 2005
I wish to propound a hypothesis that I can only begin to document here and will abandon should it be undermined by further study: A very large percentage of the professors and administrators at Harvard and most (if not all) other prestigious universities in this country are high-IQ ninnies, ideologues, cowards, and/or hypocrites.
February 5, 2005
Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.
September 22, 2004
In approving racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion for the Court tacitly endorsed an essentially permanent regime of racial balancing through preferences while purporting to ban both racial balancing and permanent preferences. At the same time, in striking down the all-too-transparent point system...
March 6, 2004
Practitioners of the loosey-goosey approach to constitutional interpretation that maddens original-meaning conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia are increasingly looking to a virtually unlimited source of new raw material: foreign law, including international human-rights conventions, Zimbabwe Supreme Court rulings, and whatever else might come in handy. Indeed, two of the...
