Legal Commentary

What Makes For A "Centrist" Justice?

By Big Tent Democrat

Stuart Taylor writes:

Obama has repeatedly stressed the "empathy" criterion . . . Meanwhile, conservative senators and legal experts and some centrists have criticized it as a thinly veiled rationale for seeking justices who will bend the law to benefit favored classes of people.

(Emphasis supplied.) "Centrists" like Taylor and Jeffrey Rosen he means ("centrists" who believe Roberts and Alito are "moderates.") But back in the real legal world, this is what "centrist" Supreme Court Justices have written, via Prof Darren Hutchinson: [More...]

[JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR:] We know that like race, gender matters. A plethora of studies make clear that in rape cases, for example, female jurors are somewhat more likely to vote to convict than male jurors. See R. Hastie, S. Penrod, & N. Pennington, Inside the Jury 140-141 (1983) (collecting and summarizing empirical studies). Moreover, though there have been no similarly definitive studies regarding, for example, sexual harassment, child custody, or spousal or child abuse, one need not be a sexist to share the intuition that in certain cases a person's gender and resulting life experience will be relevant to his or her view of the case. "`Jurors are not expected to come into the jury box and leave behind all that their human experience has taught them.'" Beck v. Alabama, 447 U.S. 625, 642 (1980). Individuals are not expected to ignore as jurors what they know as men--or women.

(Emphasis supplied.) Common sense apparently is not "centrist" for the likes of Stuart Taylor and Jeffrey Rosen.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 16, 2009 (boomark / email).