Today is the first Monday in October- the day when the Supreme Court (motto: "Precedent matters except when it's politics...") comes into session for the year. You know that certain federal bloggers live for this day as much as they do the release of the next Star Wars Episode.
But today we bring in our constitutional historian Judge Hirsch for a little history on how mediocrity almost intruded on to the Court:
Although she was sworn in over the summer, tomorrow – Monday, October 3, 2022 – Ketanji Brown Jackson will become the first Black woman to sit as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She will also become the first Floridian.
Justice Brown Jackson attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. She then went to college at Harvard, where she graduated magna cum laude. After working for a year she returned to Harvard for law school, serving as supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduating cum laude. She clerked at the district court, circuit court, and Supreme Court levels before entering practice. In 2013 she became a federal judge.
Although she is the first Floridian actually to serve on the Court, she is not the first Floridian nominated to the Court. On January 19, 1970, President Nixon had nominated a Floridian, Judge G. Harrold Carswell, to the Supreme Court. During the Senate confirmation hearings, it was reported that 40 percent of Carswell’s opinions in his years as a district judge had been reversed on appeal. Louis H. Pollak, then dean of the Yale Law School, testified that, “There is nothing in these opinions that suggests more than at very best a level of modest competence, no more than that.” Senator George McGovern used the word, “mediocrity.”
In response, Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, a devout Nixon supporter, told reporters, “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos.”
Of course while it is debatable about whether we have mediocrity on the Court, we have it in politics. It's almost everywhere you look (R).
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9 comments:
A Yale professor accusing a judge of mediocrity (or rape) is a prerequisite for the job under Trump.
It appears that the new justice jumped right in to her liberal slot and decided that adjacent but not touching water bodies ought be subject to the Clean Water Act. It is nice to know that we have a judiciary comprised of idealogues on the right and the left, although it appears that the bad "righties" sometime vote with the never bending left wingers who never stray from the rigorous left.
Some commentators suggested Hruska's complaint that "We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos" was veiled anti-Semitism. Maybe Hruska thought the court needed some more average white "good old boys" instead of all those Jewish eggheads.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new contender for the best piece of legal writing this year:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf
Were I to be selected for any honor, prestige, or position by someone who explicitly announced, "I've limited the applicant pool to people of your race and sex," I would be compelled to turn it down.
If I even suspect these are prerequisites, I do my best to avoid participation. I would not even dine at a restaurant *rumored* to refuse service based on race or sex.
Brown Jackson may have been the best and most qualified federal judge in the country. Because of Biden, we will never know. Affirmative Action, initially envisioned by Scotus as a temporary policy that now has concretized, is a moral and societal disaster and inarguably unconstitutional.
In an effort to achieve equity, we have undermined meritocracy in institutions which hold the power of life and death.
The other big headline yesterday came out of New York University, who just began enrolling students allowed to opt out of the SAT. In the name of equity. When a larger than normal number of these undergraduates failed Organic Chemistry, that famous UG course that weeds out prospective medical students, the professor (a long time, decorated and published professor of Orgo who had taught at Princeton before NYU) was fired.
Will your future surgeon, a graduate of prestigious NYU, be the best and smartest doctor for the job? Maybe. Probably. Who knows.
Was Justice Brown Jackson the best candidate for our Supreme Court? Maybe. Probably. Who knows.
Hey Rumpole - Did you ever see Sy Gaer in a trial? The jury must have loved him. He was such a charismatic human being. What did you know about his personal life? Did he have a wife? Children? What did he do when he was not working? How was his cross examination techniques? He won so many trials!
While Jews are very heavily tilted towards the intellectual heavyweights on the court's historical roster, there have been some mediorcre ones. Arthur Goldberg and Abe Fortas come to mind. Cardozo made his bones on the NY Court of Appeals. His time on the supreme court was the equivalent of Babe Ruth playing for the Boston Braves. And the most famous Jewish judge to never make it to the supremes was Learned Hand although the recently deceased Laurence Silberman is a very close second.
Most football players would not. The only exception that I can recall was Barry Sanders, still in his prime. Uninjured, but didn’t want to end up crippled.
Pablo Lyle guilty of manslaughter.
https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/10/04/jury-deliberates-in-manslaughter-case-of-pablo-lyle/
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