Category Archives: Major Print Outlets

Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.

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Keeping It Real

by Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

For many intellectuals, the ideal of Blind Justice, impartially weighing her scales, went out the window about 80 years ago. At Yale Law School in the 1920s and ’30s, a highly influential group of scholars called the Legal Realists argued that the law was not a set of fixed, unchanging rules–"not a brooding omnipresence in the sky," as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it. The Legal Realists contended that, inevitably, judges were influenced by their political views and personal values,

For many intellectuals, the ideal of Blind Justice, impartially weighing her scales, went out the window about 80 years ago. At Yale Law School in the 1920s and ’30s, a highly influential group of scholars called the Legal Realists argued that the law was not a set of fixed, unchanging rules–"not a brooding omnipresence in the sky," as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it. The Legal Realists contended that, inevitably, judges were influenced by their political views and personal values, whether they admitted it or not. There was a lot of truth to what the Legal Realists were saying. Today it is almost ajournalistic cliche that judges are either liberal or conservative, that the law is nothing but politics in disguise and that judges couldn’t be neutral if they tried.

Nonetheless, they are supposed to try. And, in fact, most judges do try to set aside or at least check their personal political leanings when ruling on a case. Judging from his life story and judicial record, few try harder than Sam Alito.

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Alito is Neither Far Right Nor Activist

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The San Diego Union Tribune

Liberal critics and many media outlets have spewed tons of misleading stuff about Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., particularly about his supposed views on abortion and about the significance of two Sandra Day O’Connor opinions disagreeing with prior Alito opinions. So here’s some straight stuff.

The claims that Alito is a "far-right activist" are laughable, except to far-left activists. He richly deserves the praise that he has received from colleagues and friends across the political spectrum for his powerful mind, intellectual honesty and fairness.

The American people will figure this out. Any effort to filibuster Alito seems likely to fail, and likely to backfire against Democrats. So, the Senate will confirm him by 60-40, give or take five votes, I’d wager. Most of the no votes (and, alas, many of the yes votes) will reflect political posturing and herd instincts rather than careful analysis.

Once installed in Justice O’Connor’s seat, Alito will be an exceptional justice. His rulings will probably be congenial to the broad middle of the electorate. He will be to the right of O’Connor – that is, the O’Connor of recent years, who has been markedly more liberal than she was before 1991 or so. Alito will probably be to the left of Antonin Scalia, albeit with less of a libertarian streak. He will be well to the left of Clarence Thomas, and far more respectful of precedent.

Alito will try as hard as anyone – and far harder than O’Connor – to be intellectually honest and analytically rigorous, and to keep his political preferences out of his legal rulings. He will therefore disappoint the most passionate political conservatives and horrify many liberals.

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Opening Argument – Borking Alito: He Is Neither Far-Right Nor Activist

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Liberal critics and many media outlets have spewed tons of misleading stuff about Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., particularly about his supposed views on abortion and about the significance of two Sandra Day O’Connor opinions disagreeing with prior Alito opinions. So here’s some straight stuff.

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Opening Argument – The Lesson Of Miers: Excellence Should Be Paramount

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"The Supreme Court [grapples with] the widest range of issues of importance to the law. To give some recent examples: What innovations are patentable and what should be the role of juries in deciding whether a patent is valid or has been infringed? Are police officers entitled to ask the passenger of a car to step outside when they have made a lawful traffic stop? Does the First Amendment protect a government worker if his boss thinks his complaints are a nuisance to the work of the office?…

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Opening Argument – The CIA Leak Scandal: A Gallery Of Antiheroes

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the CIA leak investigation consuming official Washington is that — regardless of whether crimes have been committed — so many of the principal players on all sides have been guilty of petty, ignoble and (in some cases) less-than-honest conduct.

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Opening Argument – Does Miers Have What It Takes To Excel On the Bench?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion."

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Opening Argument – Is the President’s Crony Good Enough for The Court?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met."

So reports conservative writer and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, in National Review Online. Unless White House Counsel Harriet Miers explains that she was joking or Frum was hallucinating, this alone may cast enough doubt on her judgment to warrant a "no" vote on her Supreme Court nomination.

But before detailing Miers’s liabilities, I should acknowledge her virtues. She is an impressive person with an admirable record of devotion to duty, self-effacing industriousness, quiet competence, public service, and a kind and caring heart.

Miers did very well at law school. She has been a pioneering career woman — the first hired by a big Texas law firm; the first to become president of the firm; the first to head the Dallas and then the Texas state bar associations, where she was known for reaching out to women and minorities; a successful corporate litigator; an energetic supporter of community services, including legal assistance for poor people; a member of the Dallas City Council; the head of the Texas Lottery Commission; a high-level White House official; a loving caregiver for her elderly mother; and more.

Moreover, on the current Court, Miers’s Texas roots and lack of prior judicial service may be assets. Her background as a litigator trained at Southern Methodist University’s law school would bring some diversity of experience to a Court already staffed by eight former federal appellate judges, six of whom trained at Harvard Law School. And Chief Justices William Rehnquist, Earl Warren, and John Marshall and Justices Lewis Powell and Byron White had not previously been judges either.

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Opening Argument – Problems With ‘Privacy,’ And What To Do About Roe

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"Under our constitutional system, courts stand against any winds that blow, as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement." So wrote Justice Hugo Black, a liberal hero, in 1940, in one of the most eloquent defenses of forceful judicial protection of constitutional rights ever penned. But a Hugo Black could not be confirmed today — not if his views were known. He would be voted down by Democrats, and some Republicans, for the sin of rejecting the nebulous "right of privacy" that has become holy writ and, for some, codespeak for abortion rights and gay rights. "The Court talks about a constitutional ‘right of privacy,’ " Black wrote in dissent from the 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, "as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the ‘privacy’ of individuals. But there is not…. I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision." In Griswold, the Court held by 7-2 that a Connecticut law barring contraceptive use even by married couples violated an ill-defined "right of privacy" that Justice William Douglas derived from "penumbras, formed by emanations from" various provisions of the Bill of Rights.

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Opening Argument – Young John Roberts: Reasonable On Civil Rights

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

John Roberts "was on the wrong side of history" as a young lawyer in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. He was "hostile toward civil rights." His view of the Voting Rights Act was "no less harmful to our nation’s principles of inclusive democracy" than "the violence and intimidation of 1965."